Desura digital game portal filed for bankruptcy

Hello, just a warning to all here who buy games from Desura. They have been having issues for months now in paying out the developers in a reasonable amount of time for games sold. Now the parent company has filed bankruptcy. Seems like bad news for the developers and the customers who have purchased games and built up a digital library (that would be me).

For now I plan on avoiding Desura for the time being until this gets straightened out. Too bad, I like seeing game portals that support the independent devs. To not pay them what they're owed though just sucks.

I've never heard of Desura, which may just be one reason why they are going bankrupt. Are they a portal for games like BigFish? Because if they are, I would have liked to know more about them since I have been interested in finding other places for games besides BFG.

Well that's to bad. If they do close will you still be able to play your games lakerz ?

mindysue I don't know what games they might have but most of the digital download places have a mixture of different genres.

hatshepsut

Well, yes, there are mixtures and then there are other mixtures, like those that are heavy on arcades, action, shooters, and role-playing games ... none of which I play. I would like to find more Match-3 and Time Management games, especially the newer games which have relaxed modes, something many of the older games didn't have as they were timed. Even Hidden Objects games were timed in earlier days!

mindysue IWin and Playfirst have casual games only. Most of them are the same as Bigfish. Once in awhile Iwin will get or have a game that bigfish doesn't have. I can't think of any other sites that have casual only games. I

hatshepsut

I signed up with PlayFirst way back in 2009 and stayed about 4 months. I wanted to get a Mortimer Becket game that BFG didn't have. After that I bought 5 more games and then left, not sure why now. Maybe I found downloading easier at BFG and I do tend to have problems with downloads.
Where would I find IWin?

Sorry to chime in again so late...

mindysue, desura.com is a portal that caters to indie devs selling their games (mostly). Most of these online game bundles that are so popular now like IndieRoyale, BeMine, etc. usually give out keys to desura and sometimes steam as well. They have a few casual games to buy that are match-3 and HOG but not too many. In any case, I would *avoid* desura like the plague right now since the company that just bought it looks to be very corrupt.

Steam and Gamersgate have a decent selection if you are looking for places to buy outside of bigfish. Amazon also has a selection of HOG/match3/TM games to buy and download. Gamehouse is another portal that specializes in casual games like bigfish and iwin. I think it has a rep for making you install a form of spyware though as part of the game digital download process. I've bought a number of games from them before and did not have a hard time removing the spyware afterwards.

As an aside, it did not make a lot of waves, but BigFish also sold out to another company months ago. It honestly makes me a bit nervous, as the company that purchased BigFish owns a gambling platform and race tracks or something like that and seemed to only be interested in BigFish because of their online casino games. For all I know, they intend to jettison everything non gambling/casino oriented and leave us gamers high and dry. I don't know that for sure, just conjecture.

hatshepsut - yes, desura allows one to download a game to one's hard drive to play offline. I did go through the trouble of downloading all the games that I thought I would want to play in the future. Pain in the butt, but that is the downside to buying games online these days.

Hi lakerz,
No need to be sorry, you can chime in at any time. You explained something that I have been wondering about for quite awhile now. About BigFish selling out to another company. I knew something was different over there, just didn't know what or why. I have noticed the increase in pushing casino games, something I totally have no interest in playing. Also, one sale after another as though they were going out of business. That's why I started thinking about other portals, I guess.
As for Steam, I've checked them out over there and have never found anything of interest. WadjetEye uses Steam for their adventure games and I always have trouble trying to download, so in the end I have to get a special download direct from Dave Gilbert, which is sweet of him, but then I have been buying his games from way back since The Shivah (2007) and am playing Technobabylon at the present time. It's not an easy game for me, but it does have a lot of surprises when I get something right, and I'm enjoying it a lot so far.

I had forgotten about Gamehouse.  I agree that the downloading can be a big pain.  I had wondered about Bigfish and all those casino games.

You can find Iwin here Iwin

hatshepsut

Thanks a million, hatshepsut, for the link to iWin. I had a great time yesterday checking them out and in the end I signed up and bought Journey: The Heart of Gaia. When I played it, I saw the BF logo show up on the screen, so I figured it originally was a BigFish game. It's an adventure game, no HO scenes. I've never seen it at BFG so I assumed it was an old, old game.
Anyway, to make a short story long, I went over to BigFish and looked at their adventure games and, sure enough, I found they had the game also. But then I found something else on the list: Journey to the Center of the Earth ... WOW! I so remember playing that adventure game years ago and how much I liked it. So I bought it, like immediately. Started playing and enjoying it and then ... disaster struck. When I wanted to stop playing and save the game, I couldn't find the menu hotspot and finally had to shut down the computer to leave the game!
Not the end of the story though ... because this morning when I woke up, the first thing that popped into my head was one word: ESCAPE and then I recalled that the old adventure games used the keyboard as well as the mouse and to get back to the menu one used the Esc key. It worked, and I'm one happy camper, duh, adventurer, I mean.

I'm glad you found a solution mindysue

hatshepsut

Me, too! I also found a couple of walkthroughs for the game, which I think is lucky considering how old the game is.

I remember Journey to the Center of the Earth. For me playing it was a bit buggy, game kept crashing to the desktop on me.

One thing we all need to be aware of is that some of these older adventure games are being sold on these digital portal sites like Steam/BigFish as a stripped down version of the original game. Note that they don't say that in the game description! In some cases, it's a port of the mobile version of the game, so resolution is messed up or cut scenes were taken out. I know some of the Dracula games being sold on steam are the stripped down versions. I'm pretty sure a few of the adventure games sold on BigFish are also stripped down versions. So buyer beware.

Hi, lakerz, I don't mind stripped down versions of older games since my memory isn't that accurate and I don't miss what I don't remember. Actually, in the case of Journey to the Center of the Earth, there is a major puzzle left out of the download version according to one walkthrough. The other wt has the puzzle and it's so very complicated I'm glad it was left out. The writer of the wt said it was one of the hardest puzzles in adventure gaming history and I believe it. So far the game is moving along just about the way I remember it AFTER seeing a scene, not before. It is totally worth the 7 buckazoids (Space Quest) I paid for it.

I remember a couple of complicated and frustrating puzzles in Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Yes DF also sells the stripped down version.

hatshepsut