After visiting the bargain thread I thought to myself “Hey, I haven’t been spammed by Indiegamestand in a while. I wonder what’s going on there?”. A check of my inbox shows that the last spam email from them was from 05/05/2017, with the cool looking Plantera being on sale.
But going to their website it turns out they’ve shutdown for good. Their site is just a plain page with the title “IGS defunct” and this contents:
click to expand
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.
A quick google shows this explanation page went up in December 2017, but that people had been complaining about IGS going dark in June, with the key-reselling complaint happening in November (more here).
RIP indiegamestand, I guess! I imagine the chronic fraud issue was just too much?