Discord Store To Offer Developers 90 Percent of Game Revenues (arstechnica.com)

DarkRookie2 shares a report from Ars Technica: Discord has announced that it will start taking a reduced, 10-percent cut from game revenues generated on its online store starting next year, one-upping the Epic Games Store and its recently announced 12-percent cut on the Epic Games Store. The move comes alongside a coming expansion of the Discord Games Store, which launched earlier this year with a tightly curated selection of games that now includes roughly 100 titles. The coming "self-serve publishing platform" will allow developers "no matter what size, from AAA to single-person teams" to access the Discord Store and the new 90-percent revenue share. "We talked to a lot of developers, and many of them feel that current stores are not earning their 30% of the usual 70/30 revenue share," Discord writes in the announcement. "Because of this, we now see developers creating their own stores and launchers to distribute their games instead of focusing on what's really important --making great games and cultivating amazing communities."

"Turns out, it does not cost 30% to distribute games in 2018," the announcement continues. "After doing some research, we discovered that we can build amazing developer tools, run them, and give developers the majority of the revenue share."

Comments

Re:This is worth waiting for

[rmdingler]

GP is being facetious. When the free market works properly, unencumbered by excessive government regulation, healthy competition encourages this outcome.

I have reasonable confidence when I buy on Steam

[JMZero]

..that I will continue owning that game, at least to the extent you can own a digital object. That is the core value proposition they give me. Everything else is gravy (friend list, chat, game discovery, refunds, cloud saves, etc..).

Mostly, I just want to know that when I plunk down money on a game, it will stay in the list of games I can play for a reasonably foreseeable future. I trust Valve for that because they have some track record, and over the course of many years their terms have not significantly degraded.

I'm also just generally loath to install any new store or launcher thing. I don't want a Ubisoft account or a Microsoft store account or an Origin or Epic account. I barely tolerate having a Blizzard account.

Anyway, I don't wish these guys any ill will and I think Valve could use the competition - but I don't think the world can support too many stores over the long term.

Re:I have reasonable confidence when I buy on Stea

[mentil]

Indeed, Steam has been running 14 years now; the Discord app is less than 4 years old. Discord Inc. claims they've raised over $30M in investments... which is a drop in the bucket compared to what Valve and Epic are making from Steam and Fortnite respectively. Ten years from now, will anyone still use/remember Discord? They could crash and burn like MySpace or countless other social networks. Far more likely, they'll get bought out by, say, Microsoft, and get rolled in to Skype or something.

I'd only buy something on the Discord store if it were DRM-free and I could back it up.

Re:I have reasonable confidence when I buy on Stea

[thegarbz]

..that I will continue owning that game, at least to the extent you can own a digital object.

Do you have the game Satisfactory by any chance? This is a game that was recently pulled from Steam and is now an Epic store exclusive. Now I haven't heard much about it yet but I wonder, in 5 years when you want to go back and play this again will you still be able to download and run it having purchased it in the "wrong" store?

Apple's recent experience, and their terms of service saying that a customer may not be able to download the thing they bought if its not available on their store would suggest that this is actually a bad trend rather than a good one for consumers.