By Nelson Schneider - 11/02/13 at 05:32 PM CT

It has been close to two years since those heroes of modern PC gaming, GOG and Steam, dragged me kicking and screaming back into the realm of spending the largest chunk of my gaming time on a Windows box instead of a console. Of course, the antics of Microsoft, Sony, and the Big Three publishers helped…

With nothing but happy experiences buoying me, I decided to look into yet another PC gaming hub – one that gets a significant amount of praise from Linux fans: Desura. I first ran across the name Desura being spouted by “Free as in Free Speech, not Free as in Free Beer” software proponents. Apparently, Desura was supposed to be some kind of home for small-time Indie games that couldn’t bear the thought of being shackled with Steam’s DRM (or, more than likely, didn’t have the backing to make it into Steam directly and didn’t have the quality to attract enough Greenlight votes). Based upon this hearsay, I had no real desire to look into Desura. I may like Indie games, but I like GOOD Indie games.

However, I was forced to give the Desura gaming hub a second look once I learned that a few of the Indie games on my radar were already available there, yet weren’t even up for votes on Greenlight. During the Desura signup process, I learned that it is possible to link a Steam account to a Desura account and, supposedly, gain access to Desura games that are owned by the linked Steam account, automagically. What could possibly be bad about that? And with a company description that reads, “The aim of Desura is to provide gamers with a dependable interface which delivers the content they want to play in the quickest cross-pc way possible,” I figured I had stumbled upon yet another hidden delight held by PC gaming that consoles couldn’t match.

Unfortunately, everything about Desura screams “open source software” at the top of its lungs, despite the Desura client not being open source itself. Don’t get me wrong, I love the concept of open source software, mainly the whole part about it being “Free as in Free Beer.” I’m cheap, and any software I don’t have to pay for will at least get my attention. To keep my attention, said open source software needs to work just as well as (or better than) the closed source alternatives. Sadly, due to my not-so-demanding standards, the only piece of open source software I use regularly is Mozilla Firefox. I’ve tried Open Office as an alternative to Microsoft Office – It’s not good enough. I’ve tried The GIMP as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop – It’s horrendous. After using Linux in a web administration class, I’m afraid to use it as an alternative to Windows. Desura fits right in with this pattern of substandard alternatives to existing, established software, in this case as parody of Steam.

Desura has, essentially, all of the same features that Steam has: It has digitally distributed games for sale, they regularly get discounted, they auto-update, and the Desura client includes a built-in mod management system. Anyone who signs up for Desura gets a profile page with the ability to post blogs (and games, apparently), chat with friends, write reviews, and rate the games they’ve purchased. This sounds great on paper, but in practice none of it really works very well. It’s also missing an essential piece of profile information: A wishlist. Instead of simply adding games to a list for potential purchase and sale tracking, Desura only allows games to be “watched.” Buying a watched game doesn’t un-watch it, and the Gamewatch menu is hidden so deep in the Desura client’s guts that I have difficulty finding it every time.

The worst lie told by Desura is the way in which Steam integration works… or, more accurately, doesn’t. Upon tying my Steam account to my Desura accout, I was expecting Desura to show me all of my Steam/Desura overlap games as part of my account. Upon running the excruciatingly slow “find installed games” wizard, I came back to my Steambox an hour later to discover that Desura had found only half of my installed Steam games. It also managed to find my GOG copy of “Fallout” (miraculously) while ignoring my stand-alone install of “Monster RPG 2.” The wizard happily suggested that I manually add the installation paths for any game it didn’t find. Upon doing so via yet another clunky interface, I re-ran the wizard only to get the exact same results. None of the manually-added games appeared on my Desura game list! The Desura tech support forum was completely unhelpful, with plenty of other people reporting similar issues whose requests for assistance were ignored. I was only able to get the Desura client to acknowledge my ownership of “Monster RPG 2” (a game I regret buying anyway, but it’s the principle of the thing) by redownloading a “Free as in Free Beer” copy of the game from Desura’s store (I paid 99 cents for that stinker, and now it’s free… I has a sad). I have yet to have any success getting the rest of my Steam games to appear.

Steam integration with Desura is gimped even further by NOT actually providing access to games purchased through Steam from a secondary source. I was hoping Steam/Desura integration would work similarly to how certain games from the Humble Indie Store and GOG allow users to input Steam keys in order to add a DRM free copy to their respective account. While the Desura client does have a right-click menu item that says “add to account” on each game installed from another source, this menu item doesn’t actually do anything. I suppose it would be poor business sense to give away free stuff just because someone bought the same stuff elsewhere and already owns it, but the way the descriptions of this process were worded during signup lead me to believe it would be much more pro-customer than it actually is.

The next big lie told by Desura is simply the drastic overestimation of their mod database. There are very few Desura games that support mods, and most of them that do have very few mods available. None of the games I specifically would like to mod, like “Fallout,” “Thief,” and “Deus Ex” are even in the database, when I know for a fact that high-resolution graphics mods (among other things) exist for all three of these extremely old games. What is the point in bragging about the breadth of your mod database when it doesn’t even include such simple things?

Finally, Desura falls down on the digital distribution front. I have downloaded a whopping three games from Desura and two of them encountered glitches in the process that required me to kill the entire Desura client and restart it. I will give Desura credit, at least, for having a nice, clean store interface. It’s really easy to buy and gift games, store a payment profile, and manage a shopping cart. It’s actually much snappier than Steam’s… of course, it’s not constantly being hammered by traffic like Steam.

Essentially, Desura lives in a space between GOG and Steam. It wants to support FREEDOM and Indie development, yet also wants to provide a unified experience and create a hub that does more things than GOG’s simple downloader. The end result is a gaming client that can be compared directly to Steam in the same way that Linux can be compared directly to Windows. The interface is unpolished and clunky, options are hidden in obscure places, and many of the most exciting features just don’t work. If some Indie developer releases a must-have game on Desura, I can unenthusiastically say, “buy.” But if a little patience will see the same game come to either GOG or Steam, I can’t recommend using the Desura client. It’s just too rough around the edges and is too lacking in support.