The Discord Store Will Now Give 90 Percent of Revenue to Game Developers

It seems that the Discord Store has officially joined the Hunger Games of digital stores. On Friday, Discord announced that its store will give a 90/10 revenue split to developers of all sizes who wish to publish their games via the store.

Epic Games made waves when the company announced the Epic Games Store, which would offer an 88/12 revenue split for developers. The move was lauded as providing a great alternative to Steam, which has caused many issues for game developers over time, ranging from revenue to censorship. But now, Discord is taking things a step further with its own store, which launched in August of this year.

“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,” the app company announced in a blog post. “No matter what size, from AAA to single person teams, developers will be able to self publish on the Discord store with 90 percent revenue share going to the developer. The remaining 10 percent 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,” Discord added. “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.”

Although there are some exceptions made for games created by smaller developers as part of the Steam Direct program, Valve currently has a 70/30 revenue split for the first $10 million in sales a game developer or publisher earns on Steam. After revenue exceeds $10 million and is in the range of $50 million, the revenue split becomes 75/25. Past the $50 million mark, the revenue split becomes 80/20. The Epic Games store starts at an 88/12 split and the Discord store will now take even less from developers from the start.

Until now, the store had offered a 70/30 revenue split, so this shift is massive for developers. It’s unlikely that either Discord’s store or Epic Games’ store will overthrow Steam anytime soon, but seeing this competition is proving to be rather exciting—and hopefully very good news for developers of all sizes.