News - Desura

The biggest news for us was of course the launch of SlideDB.com however with it came a bunch of cool little updates which are worth mentioning now. Firstly a very much requested fix was the ability to upload videos from Youtube.com. That is now working again. New features are.

Stats filtered by site

Previously, when you viewed a games rank on say Desura, IndieDB or SlideDB it was competing against every other game, even the triple AAA's and non mobile titles. Now ranks are only split up site by site, which fixes up buttons as you can see below.

 

Games feed xml

For advanced users, we have a custom feed containing all games on Desura and their price (and sales price) in all currencies. If you run a site such as IsThereAnyDeal.com we recommend you use it to track specials.

Highest / lowest rated reviews

Now when we display reviews in profiles we also show the highest / lowest rated, so at a glace you can see what the fanboys / haters agree with the most.

Added bigger icons support

Finally, because we have finally started supporting mobile games officially - we needed to bump up the icon resolution to support app stores and their big app icons. So when adding or editing your game, you can now submit high res icons (i.e. 512x512) and our system will automatically resize them for use.

One feature that people have continually asked for, is the ability to browse the most popular trending games, mods, groups and engines on the site. Until now on the homepage right menu we used to show the top few but no more. That all changes starting today, because you can now browse the most popular content. Here are the links:

And as an added bonus, I have also coded in the ability to browse the highest rated content:

To help you promote your mod, game, engine or group we have just created a few dynamic buttons for you to embed on your homepage, facebook, forums, blog etc. You will find these buttons on your mod, game, engines or groups homepage and they look like this:

and one for rating:

We are pretty excited by this change and hope you enjoy it too. If you have any questions or need help promoting your content with these buttons, just leave a comment.

Issue 204 of PC Powerplay features a page spread on kickstarter / desura alpha funding for indie games. Entitled "the alternative crowd" click the image below to read the article in full.

Thanks to Daniel Hindes who authored this!

We've talked about implementing HD quality videos for a long time and finally they have arrived. It will take a while for our system to render all 30,000 videos in HD, but you will notice more and more making the quality jump.

Another very cool change, is how we handle "related" content on game, development groups and engine profiles. At the moment news and downloads only show up in these profiles if the content is directly associated with it. From now on however, if you post news about your mod for Half-Life, that news will show up in the Half-Life profile as it is in-directly related. The same applies for your development group, news you post to your game profile will show up there. This change should help interlink content across the sites a lot better, and make game, engine and group profiles feel a lot less empty.

2011 was a great year for us, during which our friends at Desura finished their closed beta, became the first Linux friendly client and launched IndieRoyale. And we continued to grow ModDB and IndieDB. ModDB had it's biggest day ever reaching 220,000 visitors (thanks to the release of The Stanley Parable which got amazing coverage on Reddit and everywhere else). IndieDB also had its biggest day ever of 70,000 last week (thanks to the release of Noxious). Desura is consistently hitting 6,000+ users online simultaneously and slowly helping sell indie games (especially via alphafunding) and IndieRoyale despite only been 4 months old has already sold 172,000 bundles of games.

Don't lose downloads ala MegaUpload

So what now in 2012? Well first and foremost we are working on beefing up our download system, because the closure of MegaUpload and many other download sites has been disastrous for mods. With many old (and new titles) which were only hosted there being lost - possibly forever. So mod and game developers... please upload your releases to your profiles here or on GameFront and other dependable sites!! To encourage the spread of files, we have even made an all new dynamic download button (seen below), which can be found on all download pages so you can share your files with the world.

Direct Desura Downloads

At the moment we are also working on rolling out direct downloads via Desura, so when you purchase a game you have the option to download it via the app (like Steam), or download and install it directly without the need to run the Desura client. It is still only 50% complete - with some games having direct downloads while others don't.

Social stuff

Social integration is also going to occur a lot more, as we plan on allowing Twitter / Facebook users to post comments and register here with as little friction as possible. Also planned is the ability to add twitter feeds to your profile. We recently completed a bit of work to the image gallery system, whereby when you hover your mouse over an image you are given options to share / embed etc, as seen below.

HD videos

HD videos also remains a priority, and we will soon start encoding them while we attempt to figure out the bandwidth dilemma!

Mobile games

Do you want to browse in-development mobile games online? Would you browse a ModDB / IndieDB like site only dedicated to mobile phone and tablet games? Are you developing a mobile game and want a place to showcase it? We are considering spinning off a site focusing on mobile content - if the interest is there of course, as most people tend to find mobile content through the app stores.

More payment options

At the moment Desura and IndieRoyale only support Visa, Mastercard and Paypal. For many this means they cannot buy from us, and while it is incredibly difficult to setup new payment gateways - it is a problem we are currently working on.

Your suggestions

Finally... and most importantly of all, what would you like to see us do in 2012? Our goal is to make it easy to discover and promote games and mods you've made to as many people as possible. So anything which helps us help you - we are interested in doing.