In a blog post, Discord announced that the popular app will expand its store in 2019. It aims to become a “Game Publishing Platform” that wants to compete with Steam and the new Epic Store.
What has happened? After Discord secured dominance in the VOIP area, it is now moving to the next offensive. In 2019, the company wants to further develop its store into a Game Publishing Platform and offer developers a way to publish their games there.
In doing so, Discord also took jabs at the current monopoly holder, Steam. As stated in the blog post: “We asked ourselves many questions. Why does it cost 30% of the revenue to publish games? […] It turned out, […] it doesn’t.”
This is what Discord offers to game companies
What will the Discord store offer? After Epic with their new store promised developers an 88% share of their revenue from game sales, Discord takes it a step further.
The company promises the devs a 90/10 revenue split, regardless of whether they are indies or large AAA corporations.
The 10% that will go to Discord is only meant to cover operational costs. In the future, the company aims to work towards reducing this number even further by working more efficiently and developing better publishing tools.
This is what Discord developers say: Discord also makes an effort to stay in touch with players from their community. In the discussion thread about the store on Reddit, several developers and employees of Discord are present and answering user questions.
Here are some examples:
- According to the statement from the product designer “Daniel-at-Discord,” iOS and Linux systems will also be supported by the store.
- Player refunds should work quickly and easily, without providing the IP or going through support as an intermediate step.
- Since the store is already integrated into the Discord app, players won’t have to download another launcher.
- The patcher and downloader of the store are said to be extremely CPU efficient, says co-developer “ReallyAmused.”
- The download servers for patching are selected by the system to best suit the user.
- To avoid Discord becoming too “bloated” with the new features, the store will be treated as a kind of “app within the app.” This means that as long as the user is not explicitly in the store section, they will not notice it. Neither visually nor performance-wise, because it doesn’t need to be loaded from the PC.
More details about this will follow soon in official announcements.
This is how players react
What do gamers say? On Reddit, the announcement is a big topic. While the news about the store was very well received in the Discord subreddit, gamers in /r/games are more cautious with their expectations.
One of the users said: “I bet your store is not going as well as you expected, despite the exclusive contracts like with Epic.”
Many are also relieved that there will not be an additional launcher, but only an extension for the existing Discord app. Overall, the hype is rather limited, although people do think it’s good that more companies are challenging Steam’s monopoly.
