With over 130 million registered users, the online chatting program Discord is currently one of the most popular ways for gamers to casually communicate with each other. It also appears that the team behind the program, Hammer and Chisel, are looking to achieve even greater heights, as there's a new beta which will be available later today. This new update brings about a Store tab on the Discord startup page, and is planned to be a brand new storefront for users to buy games from. Titles from major publishers like THQ Nordic are available, as well as a multitude of indie games. For those that pay the fee for Discord Nitro ($4.99 a month, or $49.99 a year), they'll have access to a handful of games each month, not entirely dissimilar to the likes of PlayStation Plus or Xbox Live. When the service goes live, Nitro users will receive Saints Row: The Third, Metro: Last Light Redux, and Darksiders: Warmastered Edition.

Not only is the storefront major news, but Discord will also be starting up an exclusive funding program. If an indie developer agrees to publish their title on Discord exclusively first, for a minimum of 90 days, the company will help them cover some of the costs of development.

This new addition might make waves, as the current controversies around Steam in regards to adult games, or taking an incredibly lax stance on curation, or Fallout 76 skipping Steam, have some users questioning their support of Valve, and a new alternative could create competition. As of right now, the new Discord beta will only be available to select Canadian Discord Nitro users, where it will then roll out to all users at a later date.

Source: Discord

 

[Viri]

https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/91k548/our_subreddit_lost_partner_status_due_to_a_tos/

tldr FF14 Discord lost partner status because NSFW room. Thing is, the change from NSFW being allowed or not was made silently, and wasn't actually stated on the partner server rules from Discord. Meanwhile, using racial slurs is against partner rules, yet partnered servers like Overwatch, etc, have thousands of uses of such words, and they're still partners. Discord staff seemed to handle it terribly, basically gaslighting the owner of the FF14 server, and the rest of the staff waiving the issue under the rug like it was nothing.

Yikes. I hope they get some srs competition in the future. I hope they know that Discord is not Facebook or Youtube, and they can be replaced on a whim, by a better service.

 

[Essasetic]

Honestly not too bad of an idea. I'm looking forward to see how it turns out!

 

[Deleted User]

LOL fuck that shit

 

[Dr.Hacknik]

Wonderful, now Discord is going to turn into a paywall piece of garbage like Steam one day.

Honestly, the need of a Game store on Discord is completely unnecessary. As Steam, and Steam Greenlight are perfect enough for Indie devs.
What a waste of effort and money.

 

[MaverickWellington]

We now live in a timeline where Discord wants to be Steam and Steam wants to be Discord.
What a time to be alive.

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------

Wonderful, now Discord is going to turn into a paywall piece of garbage like Steam one day.

Honestly, the need of a Game store on Discord is completely unnecessary. As Steam, and Steam Greenlight are perfect enough for Indie devs.
What a waste of effort and money.

I disagree, Discord will at least have some form of content standards unlike Steam which makes selling indie games hard without marketing, because you get fucking *swamped* by asset flip shit.

 

[Deleted User]

i can't wait for discord to be even more unstable and buggy than it already is, and then have extremely shitty currency conversion (or just only accept usd, because you know, fuck international users am i right?)

fuck man, i love discord, but this is over the top, i don't think anybody wants this, there's already like 10 other storefronts, i think there's enough competition as it is

 

[Silverthorn]

Discord right now:

It's not exactly the same situation though.
There used to be one standard, which was Steam.
It held while it was peaking because most devs and publishers had no choice but to follow the playerbase and profited from the exposure, but they've always wanted to break away from it.
The biggest reason was and still is Steam's 30% revenue cut, which felt acceptable for devs back when Steam offered top-notch curation and basically guaranteed the game's success if on the storefront.
Getting on Steam is no longer a recipe for success though, and now that users are finally complaining hard about Steam, some companies and publishers feel like it's the right time to try their luck, simple as that.

 

[Deleted User]

This is the one PC Launcher I see that has a chance of holding a candle to Steam. While the UI at the moment seems a bit too cluttered for my liking, the fact that pretty much every online community these days is on Discord is going to work to its advantage. It'll be much more convenient to just organize a game directly on Discord, as opposed to having to switch over to Steam. Not many groups I know use the Steam Chat option anyways, to my knowledge. Maybe work a bit more on the custom overlay, and I can see this being viable.

 

[Kubas_inko]

So, steam, origin, uplay, discord. Anyone else wants to join the train?

 

[chrisrlink]

Sounds like a decent idea, but until the global mods stop moderating servers so harshly, they won't be getting any more money from me.

like how temp is pretty lax on modding same way they do it on irc as long as you follow EVERY rule (on most channels,yes some mod's/ops on certian channels ca be real D-bags but you just stay away from that channel

 

[linuxares]

Lets see... Steam, Uplay, Origin, GOG Galaxy, Twitch, Bethesdas silly thing and now Discord? Jeez... too many....

 

[DarthDub]

Good, I always hated having to open up Steam, especially with their new bloated updates.. Long live Discord!