The site is back up and the download links are all working now. If you haven't backed up all your Steam keys and DRM-free downloads, now is your chance.
Can anyone recommend a good online backup solution for DRM-free games? Ideally free. I know Mega.nz offers 50 GB of space for free. That's probably enough for my whole IGS wallet.
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It says: "Hello, if you're reading this, IGS is undergoing major upgrade. It's being migrated to a new server, so it's currently offline. We will reach out once this is fully fixed, via email"
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The only thing that is offline is the home page, everything else is accessible as it was before... it doesn't really look like it's being migrated... :/
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Can't help you there, I am just saving everything to an external hard drive. One day I'd like to put together a NAS solution but this will suffice for now.
Anyway thanks for the heads-up! Started downloading a few things.....
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Yep thanks Lext, grabbed my extras and soundracks and stuff.
Will always miss the old IGS — but I know the end of that era came a long time before now.
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Nothing works right now (not even trying to access the wallet directly).
If you haven't backed up all your Steam keys
I wish I could but they have a limit on how many keys you can reveal per day. It's like 3-4 keys (including Steam, game keys and Desura) per day, which besides from being stupid it's also a big pain in the ass.
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Indeed, it looks like it is completely down again for now. I managed to download everything a couple of days ago (assuming nothing was corrupted).
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I think they don't care about their customers any more. I've sent an e-mail to their Customer Support that hasn't been answered yet.
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ansd i suggest whom have unredeemed key to activate them asap...if u dont want to be fucked like me woth Indie royale and the company that bought it and never gave back what we paid for..sorry bad english, but the indie royale new owner fraud hurts bad
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Unfortunately I can't redeem any keys any more, as I can't reach my wallet. And nearly all of my keys have been stolen. Someone redeemed them. That's why I contacted their Customer Support months ago.
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welkome aboard, mate:( i fell your pain....i think we just stick to indiegala, humblebundle and bundlestars and nothing else...
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Fucking scammers. They've just charged me $29 for the Subscription to Quarterly Elite Membership even if I tried to contact them a week ago and asked them to cancel it. Great. No answer from their support, no answer on Twitter or Facebook, the website is now totally unreachable (not even the "under maintenance" message), no access to my wallet,... Well played.
And I've tried to contact Stripe, the platform they use for payments, and their reply was really encouraging: "Hi there. We can't initiate refunds for businesses, so we suggest that you reach out to the business directly." (yeah, that's what I've been trying to do the last couple of months). I've been searching through their website, but it seems there's no way for end-customers to contact them for refunds and cancellation of recurring payments. I guess they don't give a sh^t about them. Amazing service.
Any suggestions?
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I don't know, it sounds like you exhausted every avenue. Can you contact your bank or credit issuer of whatever payment method you used and ask them to initiate a refund as well as put a block on any recurring charge from IGS??
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Done. Let's see how this ends.
I'm amazed by Stripe's answer to this. All their website is aimed towards the businesses, it seems they don't care at all about end-customers. It's hard to believe that they can't do anything when a business goes out of business (oh, the irony) and they "forgot" to disable the Stripe subscription payments. I've been using them for quite some time because it's the payment gateway used by Humble Bundle and that made me think that they were "reliable". Of course, that's something you don't really know until you run into trouble.
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Well I hope you get a satisfactory result. I thought that they would be back by now, at least for a little while, but from the way things have gone it looks like we may never see them again. The situation is definitely messed up. I kind of sensed that things were going to go south when ownership of IGS first changed hands. The old owner(s) cared, even if it didn't do as well as they had envisioned, but the impression of the new ones was always 'meh' at best.
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You could also try reporting IGS (maybe Stripe too) to the relevant government business practices departments/bureaucracies in your area and theirs.
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That's pretty fucked up.
I'm glad I do stuff like that through Paypal/
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It's too bad there is no real gaming media or any journalists around to investigate and find out who IGS got sold to and WTF happened.
https://twitter.com/mgnade/status/888745388550881280
I sold the site last August. Sorry it didn't make it but there's nothing I can do now. New owner locked me out last fall.--Mike Gnade
More discussion here:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/IndieGameStand/discussions/0/2132869574272145677/
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Thanks, interesting read. Will have to keep tabs on that discussion in the unofficial Steam group.
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I will try to retweet Mike's tweet mentioning several gaming media accounts and relevant users in the indie game scene... Let me know if you have any suggestions!
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In regards to the Ben Chong that you found and messaged on Facebook, what makes you think that is the right Ben Chong? Just the name and nothing else? I've found a much stronger candidate, but I want to understand why you contacted this person.
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Sorry, I've fixed the link to the correct Facebook profile. The one linked now seems to be a good candidate because of his friends and a couple of Facebook groups he is in. There's no recent updates, though. At least public ones...
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OK, that may be the right person, because of the scarf. This is the person I was looking at:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marketjs
https://www.quora.com/profile/Ben-Chong-3
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/author/BenChong/910876/
His company:
https://www.marketjs.com/about
And a Twitter note about a stolen game on his company's web site:
https://twitter.com/photonstorm/status/885499469726351360
He's actually involved in the gaming industry and has a focus on corporate branding and marketing, and my fear is that IndieGameStand has fallen apart because he intends to change it into something other than what it already was. This person is not interested in indie gaming, and he's going to use the IGS brand for something else.
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Thanks a lot for the extensive research!
I've forwarded my initial emails to ben@marketjs.com and support@marketjs.com , not sure I'll get an answer anyway...
This person is not interested in indie gaming, and he's going to use the IGS brand for something else.
Well, OnePlay bought Desura and promised its users that they were going to bring it back. I'm not sure if they changed the date of the press note, but right now they are aiming to be back up and running in the third quarter of 2017. Until now they only have used it to spam and advertise their OnePlay service.
At this point, I really don't care what Ben Chong is planning to do with IGS. But he surely must do a couple of things about it:
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Stop (and delete) all recurring payments that are done via Stripe, since he is the only one who can do it. Without a proper IGS website with an option to cancel the Elite membership subscription, it's impossible to do anything. And Stripe won't care.
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E-mail all the game keys (Steam and non-Steam) to IGS customers. That's basic common sense. A method to do a final download of our DRM-free games would be nice, but I wouldn't count on it. I managed to make a backup of my games a few months ago (when IGS started acting strangely), but I'm missing the most recent stuff. I might try to contact users from this thread who said that they were doing backups (Shad0WeN, lext, CaptainElectric,...) to see if they can share what I'm missing.
The main problem with (2) is that IGS might have not enough keys for all his users. When I tried to save as many keys from my wallet as I could (with that stupid limitation of 3-4 keys revealed per day) a lot of them gave me that "We ran out of keys, sorry! The developer has been contacted and will add more keys soon" (or something similar). Of course, they never restocked them, and I doubt that developers who worked with IGS are going to give them more keys (a few of them have already stated that they haven't been paid by IGS).
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WARNING: They're back and encouraging developers to REVOKE all unused keys from the site. From what I read on Twitter, some* developers have already started to do so. My thoughts on this
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.*
https://twitter.com/chubigans/status/926884513090822145
https://twitter.com/QuantizedBit/status/927111052059398145
https://twitter.com/milkstone/status/932549598635286528
https://twitter.com/blackpantsgames/status/933310248995246080
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I wanted to check for my keys, but it shows the same message when you visit the site now.
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Forget about the keys, it seems that they lost everything and they don't even have backups for their database. Having the database would make it trivial to e-mail the Steam keys to their customers, but I guess the easiest way out is to tell the developers to revoke all keys and screw the end users.
We didn't have enough technical skills to recover the broken website and database
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.
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We didn't have the competency necessary to run the site either properly or effectively after having bought it from the previous owner(s).
^ There, I fixed it. This is how the real truth would read. Oh and this latest 'situation' is beyond ridiculous. What a cheap sucker punch.
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To those who may not be aware, the original founders of the company sold it to a new owner some time ago and ever since then I have to say it has been run rather poorly. It has not been unusual for the revolving 'PWYW' deal to expire and then not get replaced by anything for days, or to simply get extended without warning, which screws with anyone who actually subscribed to their 'Elite' package or whatever. I've also noticed that the site has been down for a couple of days now. At first there was some sort of DNS problem with the provider that made it unreachable, and now there is a security issue regarding invalid certificates instead. Even if you add an exception the site loads but is essentially blank.
This kind of stuff and lack of reliability never used to happen under the previous ownership and it's future should certainly be questioned. I hope that you all backed up your keys and downloaded whatever you may have wanted (I did so recently for the most part) because given the evidence I have a sneaking suspicion that the site's days may be numbered. If it comes back up I would strongly recommend saving your purchases without procrastinating on it.
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