Linden Lab have issued a new press release today announcing that Bad Juju Games has acquired Desura. Bad Juju Games confirmed this transition by releasing a press release which goes into depth further about the changes (see below). Linden Lab first acquired Desura back in July 2013 and many thought that was the right thing to do by spreading into different markets. In recent years Versu, Creatoverse. Dio and Patterns have been knocked out of window it seems. Linden Lab is now focused on SL2 and on Second Life.
For those that don’t know already Desura is a community-driven digital distribution service that puts the best games, mods and downloadable content from developers at gamers fingertips. What do you think of this latest news good/bad ?
Linden Lab Press Release
As has just been announced, Bad Juju Games has acquired Desura from Linden Lab.
Bad Juju has taken over all day-to-day support, maintenance, and ongoing enhancements to the Desura website and service platform. The Bad Juju team will be reaching out directly to developers with games on Desura and are happy to respond to any questions they may have.
Transitioning Desura to a new owner is great for Linden Lab and our customers, as it allows us to further enhance our focus on creating the ambitious next-generation virtual world, while continuing to improve Second Life and growing Blocksworld.
Desura is a fantastic platform for game developers and players, and we look forward to seeing it continue to evolve and grow, now as part of Bad Juju Games.
Bad Juju Games Press Release
ALISO VIEJO, CALIFORNIA, November 5, 2014: Indie Game and Middleware Tools Developer Bad Juju Games®, today announced that it has officially acquired Desura™, a comprehensive digital distribution service for PC, Mac and Linux gamers from its former owner and operator Linden Lab®. The move comes after several months of coordinated planning by the companies to ensure uninterrupted operation of the Desura service as well as a comprehensive roadmap of new features that will significantly benefit both its users and game developers during the upcoming months and beyond.
Linden Lab has begun an ambitious project to create the next generation of virtual worlds, while continuing to improve Second Life®, and growBlocksworld®. Transitioning Desura to Bad Juju Game ship enables the company to enhance the focus of its resources on these priorities, while ensuring that spirit of Desura’s original vision lives on and game developers and players on the platform continue to be well served.
In addition to development of its own game titles, Bad Juju Games has spent the majority of the past few years building state-of-the-art big data backed tools, technology and interactive solutions for several “AAA” game titles in the Console and Mobile Gaming markets including popular franchises such as Call of Duty®, Tekken® and Ace Combat® to name a handful. Today, the Bad Juju Team has completely re-architected its technology focusing on an extensive assortment of game enhancing features that would otherwise be cost prohibitive for Developers to justify on a limited budget or while facing rather aggressive timetables.
As the Gaming industry continues to evolve at a dramatic rate, Bad Juju Games is dedicated to providing solutions for Mobile, Console and PC based Developers that significantly level the playing field and provide many of the core services that Gamers have come to expect from top grossing game titles. Through its acquisition of Desura, Bad Juju Games will be offering its Developers at no additional costs, the core modules and services such as Leaderboards, Achievements, Cloud Storage, Player Stats and Profiles and its Business Intelligence that are also fully cross-platform.
But not only will Game Developers benefit from news of the Bad Juju acquisition, as the dedicated Gamers choosing to make their purchases from Desura can expect rather significant overhauls in the Desura experience, major price savings, rewards, an expanded game title catalog and a fully native cross-platform game management client application that Desura has been lacking. “From the start, Desura has made great strides to deliver Gamers a viable game publishing service offering a wide selection of games not found on Steam®”, commented Tony Novak, President of Bad Juju Games. “Now, our team at Bad Juju is tasked with significantly raising that bar – An effort that we intend to approach while continuing to embrace the DRM Free movement and principles that has made Desura a contender amongst the limited field of digital and PC Games Publishers.”
“This marks a very important milestone for Bad Juju Games to reach the greatest breadth of Game Developers and Gamers whom all share a fanatical passion for gaming as a whole,” continued Novak.
“Bringing back the ‘old school’ game titles that have been lost but not forgotten, finding new emerging titles and tapping into the wealth of Asian import games are just a few of the efforts that Bad Juju will be actively pursuing as Desura is absolutely here to make a very loud splash in the market.”
About Bad Juju Games
Founded in 2010, Bad juju Games has assembled a highly experienced team of veteran video game industry developers and artists to build the next generation middleware technology platform for the Mobile, Console and PC Gaming markets.
Leading with their GOOP.io® product, Bad Juju has architected a lightweight low-level gaming API and Web Services backend built to fully leverage the benefits of Big Data. GOOP.io is a simple, flexible and efficient API that enable the collection of massive quantities of game play data, statistics and invaluable business intelligence. Platform agnostic leaderboards, player profiles, trophies/achievements, match data, cloud saving/storage, game lobbies, and events are among the baseline features that GOOP.io offers.
For more information and to explore current job openings, please visit us on the web at the BadJuju.com.
About Desura
Initially released in 2009, Desura has grown from its humble beginnings to a formidable catalog of more than 2600 high-quality published games and over a million monthly active users with a strong worldwide reach. Adding over 600 new users every day, Desura is expanding its presence constantly as will soon be introducing Android based game titles, new branding and a greatly enhanced user experience in its website and game client application.
For more about Desura, its products and to stay in touch with upcoming announcements be sure to visit us on the web at the Desura.comwebsite or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Contact Information
Contact: PR Manager
Phone: +1.949.600.8040
Email: press@badjuju.com
Daniel Voyager 