Desura is a digital distribution platform from the guys at DesuraNET, the company behind ModDB and its sister site IndieDB. It allows developers of indie games publish and sell their games without the need for a publisher, even letting you push your game directly out from one of their community sites. This low barrier to entry along with the powers of the large communities built up around ModDB and IndieDB is the driving force behind an independent alternative to Steam.

Desura is a program which you download and, once logged in with a DesuraNET login, download games and mods to run directly from the application's interface. It works pretty much like Steam and even uses the same principle of embedding a website inside a shell as their main form of navigation.

The interface is a direct descendant from the ModDB/IndieDB websites, but differs slightly in how games are presented. Every game that is published through Desura is required to go through a "quality assurance" period in which a team of moderators determine whether or not the game is of high enough caliber to be sold on their platform. Publishing a game or mod on Desura also requires a certain amount of content to be present, such as screenshots, articles and a trailer video. This attention to detail makes browsing for games a pleasure and their scrutiny may seem like Apple-level draconian control, but it does mean that the catalogs aren't bogged down with tons of half-finished demos and lackluster hobby projects.

The influence from DesuraNET's websites makes browsing for games and mods a breeze, due to their heavy focus on filtering. If you want, you can find singleplayer horror adventure games, anime-inspired mods for Half-Life 2 (there are none, I checked) or all car-combat games. It's a nice feature and is a boon for anyone who wants to sift through the large amount of available content.

Downloading and installing games works as you'd expect. Once you find a game or mod you like, you click on your desired downloading option, whether it's the full game or a demo and it'll download and install without any more hassle, although mods go through an automated process which finds the parent game. Managing the games is simple as well and although it's missing the option to create categories for your games (other than toggling whether or not they are "favorites"), it does have a local search function which is fast and, in my opinion, the more favorable function to have.

I can't talk about Desura without talking about their "Alphafunding" service, which is a crowd-funding principle similar to Kickstarter. In essence it's simply the means to provide gamers with a pre-order alpha version, but wrapped in a fancy wrapper and its very own section in the store. Considering the success that Minecraft and Natural Selection 2 have had with reaching out to the gaming community for funding in return for early access to the game during the development period it makes perfect sense for a community-driven service to create that possibility for its users. As a concept, it looks like the future of independent game development and if it becomes more popular, Desura will be on the forefront of this movement.

Desura feels like a legitimate independent alternative to Steam and other digital distribution platforms. Being so closely attached to IndieDB and ModDB can only work in its favor, being a logical stepping stone for developers who are part of those communities. The program itself works well and is simple to use. It has crashed a few times, but that's forgiveable considering how unstable Steam was when it first came out.

Desura is currently available for Windows and Linux operating systems, and a Mac version is "in the works": http://www.desura.com/