After debuting the Discord store this year, Discord has new plans.
Beginning 2019, developers will be able to self publish with a 90/10 revenue split. This is higher than Epic’s split for their recently launched Epic Games Store. This is also much higher than Valve’s 70/30 split with a store that favours bigger developers for revenue. Discord’s statement for the store from the full blog is below:
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 30% of the usual 70/30 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 30% 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 30% 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, from AAA to single person teams, developers will be able to self publish on the Discord store with 90% revenue share going to the developer. The remaining 10% covers our operating costs, and we’ll explore lowering it by optimizing our tech and making things more efficient.
We will also empower developers to communicate with their players by improving Verified Servers, extending their ability to add great content to the Activity Feed, and more. We believe if we iterate and work with developers, we can reverse platform fragmentation in the game industry while connecting developers and players closer together.
Lastly, we will continue to focus on what’s brought 200 million people to Discord so far — top tier voice, video, and text chat. We’re constantly working on making Discord better, faster, stronger, and we have a slew of features coming out in the next couple weeks to months (including some of our top requested features on our official feedback site. We see you).
As always, we’re thankful for everyone who’s supported Discord this far. You’re amazing and you make coming to work every day so inspiring for all of us. We look forward to the amazing ways we can continue to support players and developers in the future.
The Discord store is definitely going to be one to watch.