The online digital distribution store war is heating up even more. After creating digital distribution storefront earlier this year, Discord has announced where they plan to take the storefront in 2019. Announced via the Discord Blog, the company plans to introduce two major things to the store for developers.
Beginning next year, Discord will allow all developers, “no matter what size, from AAA to single person teams,” to officially self publish their own games on the Discord store along with a massive 90/10 revenue split for developers. Discord stated that their ten percent cut will be covering the operating costs. Furthermore, the company plans to “explore lowering it by optimizing our tech and making things more efficient.”
This news of the company’s revenue split shift comes off the back of other companies adjusting their revenue splits with developers. A few weeks ago, Valve introduced new revenue tiers to Steam where their 70/30 revenue split is reduced to 75/25 if a game makes over $10 million and even further to 80/20 if a game makes over $50 million. Then, shortly thereafter Epic Games announced their own online store that would have an 88/12 revenue split with all developers. Now, Discord will have the lowest cut of the major online digital distribution storefronts.
In the blog post, Discord stated that developers are no longer fond of the current 70/30 split most storefronts have. Due to this, developers are finding ways to launch their games on their own “instead of focusing on what’s really important — making great games and cultivating amazing communities.” Thus, Discord is trying to rectify that with their planned new revenue split.
Discord also announced that they plan to update the their Verified Services and Activity Feeds to allow better communication between developers and their audiences. This, along with the new revenue split, will allow the opportunity for developers to garner more attention for their games from Discord’s over 200 million users.