MM wrote:

I bought a bunch of games from Desura. Then Desura went tits-up. Those games that were DRM-free I had burned to disk and I still play some of them to this day. Those that weren't DRM-free are gone like a fart in the wind, my money too. I've had various other indie games with various other forms of DRM go tits-up over the years and those games are gone too. But if GOG goes tits-up, I've got backups. And about the only other posts I'm reading here lately are all about how the Epic store is throwing money around, trying to muscle Steam off its perch.

Dear readers, we apologize for not being able to keep IGS running. We owe it to you to explain what happened.

IGS is no longer operational since many months ago, due to the following reasons

Operational costs were too high - we were losing money every month, for over 1.5 years.

We couldn't make enough deals with developers with strong games. It was really hard and expensive to convince strong devs to list games on our platform with a small audience.

This caused sales to be very low. Each PWYW (Pay What You Want) only resulted in less than 100 USD total sales on average. With only 4-5 PWYWs per month, you can imagine the sales we make. Plus, a big percentage of that gets paid back to the developers.

Besides PWYWs, almost nobody bought the regular games. Everyone was just going after PWYW. After looking at the data for a long time, we had the feeling that almost nobody wanted to pay for anything with Steam games.

After our server provider got acquired, they upgraded and our entire infrastructure broke.

We didn't have enough technical skills to recover the broken website and database (it's not as easy as fixing PHP scripts. It went down to core infrastructure level, because of fundamental upgrades to certain libraries). This explains the downtime you saw.

Unfortunately, there is nothing we could do to recover it. We tried communicating with the server provider, but we just weren't good enough technically to solve the problem together. After failing to pay the bills, we lost access to the server.

We saw some speculation online alleging that we resold the keys. This is NOT true. We can confirm, that we DID NOT sell any keys to any third party. There was no instruction to sell any keys whatsoever.

We are not angry at the parties that speculated. After all, everyone is allowed to have an opinion online, and we respect that.

To be honest, we have no idea what happened to the keys. We can only blame ourselves for not handling this properly, after losing access to our server.

We do agree with what others have said, that the best solution for developers is to revoke their steam keys.

We have also given refunds to many developers and buyers for PWYW payouts / any remaining balances.

If there is anything we can do to help, please email support at indiegamestand dot com. This will be our single communication channel, since we have nothing else left.

Again, we truly apologize for all this. It sucks. We tried various ways to revive IGS after it changed management multiple times. We lost a lot of money doing so, and ultimately it just didn't work financially and technically for us.

Thank you for reading this.

IGS Support

Note: If you're a consumer, and want better options and deals, please try other websites such as Humble Bundle, Bundle Stars, Indie Gala, etc.