Ownership Of Desura Changes, Again

Ownership of Desura has changed hands again, and this time it's by Bad Juju Games. They do include some pretty welcome news in their press release.

The most important section is this:

Quotea fully native cross-platform game management client application that Desura has been lacking

That one part sparked my interest, so we have shot off an email to the new owners to clarify if that includes bringing back the long lost Linux client for the Desura store.

See the full press release here.

How does this make you feel about Desura? We thought Linden Labs taking ownership would bring great things, but it destroyed the open source client forcing a Contributor Agreement onto people which cause pretty much everyone to leave, so will Bad Juju Games bring back the Linux love? Hopefully we will have answers soon if they email us back.

UPDATE, things are looking good after my chat with them:

QuoteHi Liam (pleasure to e-meet you),

It's HUGE on our list, along with actually adding more Linux titles as well. I know you have probably heard a myriad of promises and stories regarding Linux support and I'm very sorry. I've spent the past several months coming to the conclusion that the client is severely out of date -- Like the last update for Linux support was literally performed in 2011.

Our plan is indeed to go Multi-platform on the client side. We have a team that has already started to tackle design, because I feel the client isn't much more than a glorified web browser in all reality. That said, we want a lot more for our users and while we aren't Valve or Steam; there's no reason we can't raise the bar considerably.

So, yes, we are looking at supporting Windows, Mac and Linux equally and without the "you should install WINE" type of answers... This may end up being quite challenging, but we like challenges. We have deployed game titles for Linux for some of our clients, so in short.... the answer is YES.

We are looking at this from two angles: Short term and Long term. very honestly, we don't know what is broken presently, but we do have a developer looking into the issue to see if this could just be a quick temporary fix to get the client back up. At the same time, the redesigned multi-platform solution is a little more lengthy of a process, but that one can absolutely be tackled (we just don't want Linux Gamers to wait any longer than they have to).

Hopefully that covers it, but feel free to hit me up anytime you have a question. Please keep in mind, we have a really good relationship with Linden and will continue to work with them to get a better understanding of all the pieces in this rather large beast of a site and tools. So, I fully understand that they had to pick their battles. Nevertheless, we are a bunch of old school computer guys over here with pretty much every platform at our disposal and so we don't want to leave anyone behind!

Regards,

Tony

Tony also mentioned they are going to put up a sort of public roadmap, and you might even be able to vote on what you want first. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.