Desura sold many games that were previously included in Humble Bundle initiatives, as well as numerous other commercial titles.

Originally, the platform was developed by DesuraNET; it was later sold to Linden Lab, and then to Bad Juju Games, which filed for bankruptcy in June 2015.

[11] Development on a Linux client was announced during the Summer of 2011,[12] utilizing wxWidgets and GTK+ as the toolkit, and was introduced as a limited beta program in the Fall.

[13] The client was publicly available for download and execution, but users could not log into the online service unless they were a selected beta tester.

The client itself would be released under the GNU General Public License, while the server-side portion of the distribution platform would remain proprietary.

[23] The free software release and development was handled in a manner similar to Google's Chromium project.

After acquiring Desura, Linden Lab changed their Terms of Service to include the wording that they have future rights to use and adapt content from their virtual citizens.

[33] On October 28, 2016, the desura.com home page showed the following message: "OnePlay has recently bought the Desura and Royale assets from Bad Juju.

[34] An apparent effort was also made to give access back to the user accounts and libraries, but without any success to this day.

[35] In the summer of 2020, Desura changed its owner again, the site was bought at an auction by the Finnish company Behemouse, one of whose activities is the development of HTML5 (formerly Flash) web games and promotion of other websites related.