Just last week, Epic Games announced that they would be launching a new storefront that would give developers a larger percentage–88% goes to devs–of revenue than if they were to take their games to other competing stores such as Steam and Origin. It was a move seen by many as the first to really fight back against Steam in particular and end Valve’s near-monopoly on the PC digital games storefront.

Well, as of today, Discord, the company behind the communication app of the same name, has come out and is announcing that they’ll soon be doing things in a similar manner, and will be giving developers an even larger cut of revenue compared to even that of Epic Games store. Beginning in 2019, the Discord Store will begin allowing developers to self-publish games through their storefront with the revenue split being that of 90/10. This will become the highest revenue split number available for developers in the current storefront landscape and will be available to everyone from triple-A devs down to the smallest one-man indie teams.

Discord says that the came to this decision after doing research earlier in the year to learn the cost it really takes to distribute games. What they learned was that a 70/30 split between devs and others storefronts was essentially asinine and through the use of a set of self-publishing tools that Discord will offer, they can give developers all the way up to 90% of revenue on their games. Discord says that the 10% that they will take is purely for operational costs, but they’ll look to lower that number even further if possible.

While Discord’s storefront has just been getting off the ground the past few months, it’ll be interesting to see how developers respond to this. With a platform that already has 200 million users on it plus the added benefit of now offering the best revenue split, I’m curious to see if this is a storefront that will begin getting a ton more traction in the future.

One thing’s for sure though: many are gunning for Steam more than ever before. I’m looking forward to seeing if Valve changes their tactics whatsoever with how they currently operate Steam or if they’ll stand pat despite Epic and Discord now clearly coming for them.

It’s going to be intriguing to see how this all plays out in 2019 and I feel like we’re just getting started.

Posted: Dec 16, 2018 11:37 am
Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/discord-store-90-10-revenue-split-2019/