In its ongoing missions to be known as anything other than "the company that made the game for unconventional virtual reality cybersex," Second Life developer Linden Lab has bought digital distribution platform Desura. It may not be a huge name, but the site is awfully popular with lesser-known indie developers as it's entirely open, which fits in with Linden quite nicely.

Desura started as a spin-off of mod hub ModDB, basically the same idea but for indie games. It aims to take the fuss and bother of selling games off developers, handling sales and providing subsites with blogs, videos, comments, and whatnot, and a spread of community features.

Linden hasn't bought ModDB or its sibling sites IndieDB and SlideDB, mind--only Desura.

"Desura's talented team, thriving business, and impressive technology are a great fit for Linden Lab," Linden CEO Rod Humble said in the announcement. "This acquisition gives us a global platform for serving creative developers of all kinds, and we're looking forward to growing both Desura's global community of gamers and its fantastic portfolio of thousands of games, mods, and other content."

Linden Lab has done more than Second Life, of course. It's made several other creative games/tools/things, the most recent of which is Patterns. It's also working on iPad build 'em up Blocksworld, which it bought earlier this year.

[Full disclose etc: Shacknews owner GameFly runs its own digital distribution store.]