A few weeks ago, Epic Games announced that it was launching the Epic Games Store. The revenue sharing was slightly better than what others offered, and the company probably spent a fortune on landing compelling exclusives. Today, Discord, the popular voice chat platform, announced its intention to change its own games store. It'll beat them all by giving developers ninety percent of the revenue.
Discord issued the following statement on its website. While competition is good, it seems like the PC market is moving towards fragmentation at this rate. We wonder who else will launch a better games store in the future.
In 2019, the Discord store will allow all developers to self-publish games with a ninety to ten revenue split. Back in 2015, we asked ourselves a few questions. Why do you still need to enter an address to join voice chat? Why do gamers have to pay for voice chat? Discord has also brought game developers and their fans much closer together. As a player, there is something amazing about jumping into a verified community server and talking directly to the developers who build the game you love. Earlier this year though, we noticed a change happening in the game industry. We talked to a lot of developers, and many of them feel that current stores are not earning their thirty percent of the usual seventy to thirty revenue share. 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. So, we asked ourselves a few more questions. Why does it cost thirty percent to distribute games? Is this the only reason developers are building their own stores and launchers to distribute games? Turns out, it does not cost thirty percent to distribute games in 2018. After doing some research, we discovered that we can build amazing developer tools, run them, and give developers the majority of the revenue share. 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, developers will be able to self publish on the Discord store with ninety percent revenue share going to the developer. The remaining ten percent covers our operating costs, and we'll explore lowering it by optimizing our technology and making things more efficient. We will continue to focus on what's brought two hundred million people to Discord so far.
While the ninety to ten split is admirable, it's unclear how much of Discord's "two hundred million users" will purchase games. A lot of people use it not for gaming communication, but for teams and an alternative to Skype. Its success will depend on those percentages and how it can acquire more customers it seems. Only time will tell.
What do you think of the new Discord games store model? Let us know. Are you looking for an alternative to Steam at this point?
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