The once Australian-owned digital storefront Desura has weathered some turbulent times of late. A couple of years ago it was acquired by Second Life developer Linden Lab, though it didn’t take long for the company to unload its purchase to Bad Juju Games in November of last year. Now it’s in the middle of a payment debacle, which it has attempted to tackle in a blog post.
Desura has had to deal with “a number of very difficult issues”, including the “current hospitalization of [its] CEO”, that have resulted in payment delays to developers, according to an announcement from Bad Juju representative “LadyAijou”.
It goes on to mention that the company is not “refusing to pay”, instead, it is dealing with issues that “need work to correct”. The original post doesn’t go into much detail as to what the issues are, however, an addendum provides a little insight:
While [the CEO’s] absence has, as I said above, compounded things over the last week or so, it was and is the lack of automated payment systems which created this bottleneck, and that is where our focus is currently. We do have to await his return before moving forward with implementing solutions, but we are doing our best to continue to stay in communication with everyone.
It’s good that Desura has made some sort of attempt to calm its developer community, however, it will indeed be sustained communication over the next few weeks that should see a return to normalcy for the company.
We have heard, and are aware of the issues, and are working to correct them. [Desura]
Comments
5 responses to “Digital Distributor Desura Explains Why It Hasn’t Been Paying Developers”
Any financial officer should have the authority to pay contractual debts, the CEO’s absence has no bearing on this problem whatsoever. As for automated payments, Bad Juju has had responsibility for Desura for 6 months, if they had a bottleneck they would have known about it long before now. There’s no excuse for late payments, especially for indie developers where every payment is their livelihood.
Only think I can think of is the systems they’re using have become non-viable and they need the CEO’s authorization to contract new systems.
I’ve worked at a company where the CEO insisted on counter-signing every major outlay (everything over $1k or so). When he/she is away things can get pretty desperate.
On the other hand, they guy is in hospital, not in Tahiti. Surely somebody can visit him with a copy of the new contract and a pen.
At the place I work currently, the CEO has to sign off on every single pay, not because they are cheques, but because he wants to micromanage every one of the 40 or employees. This means our pay can be delayed by 1-4 days around a weekend or holiday.
I had a differently worded post originally that said if the CEO was required to sign off on payments then the company was either operating illegally or negligently, but I decided to tone it down a bit before posting. Day to day operations payments should never be bottlenecked through the CEO except in the smallest of small businesses. Bad Juju’s not that small.