Discord enters the Store Wars after Epic Store with new revenue model

As if the recent news that game publisher and developer Epic is challenging Valve’s throne as the undisputed leader of digital distribution on the PC wasn’t a bombshell enough, popular chat app Discord has now announced their own plans to make their own digital game store the most lucrative for publishers and developers.

For years now, Steam has established themselves as the place to get games on the PC. Unsurprisingly, as Valve was at the forefront of digital distribution on computers way back in the early 2000s. Despite several big publishers like EA, Ubisoft and Blizzard going their own ways by creating their own launchers and stores, none of them really managed to put a dent on Steam.

After 15 years of Steam and the sheer dominance of it, things are looking to change however. The creator of Fortnite, Unreal Tournament and Gears of War have just launched their own Epic Store and offer other game makers and publishers a higher revenue cut than is the standard across PC and consoles. Instead of the industry standard of 30%, Epic only takes 12% as the store owner.

So, starting in 2019, we are going to extend access to the Discord store and our extremely efficient game patcher by releasing a self-serve game publishing platform. No matter what size, from AAA to single person teams, developers will be able to self publish on the Discord store with 90% revenue share going to the developer. The remaining 10% covers our operating costs, and we’ll explore lowering it by optimizing our tech and making things more efficient. – Discord

It looks like the management behind chat application Discord has taken some notes of Epics tactics and now announces changes to their own Discord store’s revenue model. From now own, companies who sell their games on the Discord store will keep 90% of the revenue, with Discord getting just 10%. That’s a slightly better cut than what even Epic offers.

Furthermore, Discord is also doing away with their initial approach of a curated store library. Starting next year, big game studios and single indie devs alike will be able to self-publish their games on the Discord store, expanding the store’s library.

Now, will this mean that the Discord store is going to be the future of PC gaming? Unlikely, at least for now, as Discord has been struggling to make a name for their Discord store which launched this August. So, maybe this new move is aimed to market their store rather than aggressively attack Steam. And unlike Epic, Discord also lacks incentives for customers in form of store exclusives.

One thing is for sure though. Next year, is going to be an interesting one for PC players.