You will be forgiven for not paying much attention to the Discord Store, since it doesn't currently support Linux. It seems that is going to change and they've announce a pretty small cut compared to the competition.
Firstly, today the Discord team announced in a new blog post that starting in 2019 they will only take a 10% cut from developers. Considering Valve still take 30% unless you earn a lot of money and even the Epic Store will take 12% that might help quite a bit. Not only that, Discord do have a pretty large pull considering they're already the go-to application for a lot of people to chat, even game developers and publishers have moved over in large numbers to have their community on Discord. I wouldn't underestimate them if they keep pushing it.
Sadly though, the Discord Store currently only supports Windows but that will change. According to one of their team on Reddit, who said this:
Good news! Everything we built for the store actually works great on macOS and Linux. A lot of our devs use those platforms internally. We just wanted to focus on releasing Windows first to make sure everything works, and to be honest thats where most of our users are. We will definitely bring things to all platforms!
Usually, when replying to questions about other platforms you get some kind of vague response but that's pretty darn clear. As always though, we will believe it when we see it. Words are nice, actions are better. We will be keeping an eye on it though for sure.
Considering their chat client already works rather nicely on Linux, the Discord Store could be one to watch as well. While they don't technically do fully exclusive games, they do have timed exclusives and so eventually we may get in on the action for those too.
Ps. Use Discord? Come join our very own server.
Hat tip to Jens.
Quoting: Asunow that's something. Still valve has proton and that's a yuge thing.Valve's Proton is available for use by to the competition.
That's the reason I will keep buying from Steam. Because Valve-tax keeps my total gaming future bright, not only of a few developers.
Quoting: SalvatosWell, that's assuming Epic and Discord are letting anything get onto their stores and not vetting games. Is that known at this point?
Well it remains to be seen how much vetting a 10% cut will afford. Salaries are normally the largest cost and vetting takes quite a lot of human resources so to speak.
But time will tell, I'm not on any mission play that Steam is the one and only viable platform and that a 30% cut is the only possible way. I'm simply concerned about these new stores that try to compete with a large discount while (some) people seams to assume that the service will be the same. Because I've seen this very same thing happening in my own business and quality went down the drain as a result but then games might be different than finance.
Quoting: AppelsinQuoting: F.UltraQuoting: AppelsinSteam need to get off their behinds, clean up their store for asset flip bloat and crap
My guess is that all those asset flip bloat and crap will be among the first to switch over to these new stores considering that the lower cut is so much more important to these people. And if the refund policy will not match that of steam:s (or even exist at all) then they should love it even more there.
That is of course a very real possibility. No refund, no reivews, a fresh start so to speak. It'll be interesting to see if they (Discord and Epic) have learned more from Greenlight than Steam (or Nintendo! seems to. GOG have largely kept out of this race top the bottom.
After checking, it seems they have refunds. Same as Steam (14 days, 2 hours played), but not covering DLC apparently.
Quoting: SalvatosWell, that's assuming Epic and Discord are letting anything get onto their stores and not vetting games. Is that known at this point?
Unsure, but I found the following on their page:
QuoteHere you’ll see a curated list of games for your buying pleasure! Our store has a hands-on personal approach to give you the best information about each game. Each game has a video preview on hover and a custom description so you know what the game is about so you can browse easily.
Hard to say if it's just the list you see that's "curated", or the entire library. I would assume thought that common sense dictates that if you're just starting up a store, you wouldn't want it to run over with crap from day one, so I would assume there's at least some level of vetting going on. But hey, common sense isn't everyone's cup of tea :)
Quoting: SalvatosWell, that's assuming Epic and Discord are letting anything get onto their stores and not vetting games. Is that known at this point?
Well it remains to be seen how much vetting a 10% cut will afford. Salaries are normally the largest cost and vetting takes quite a lot of human resources so to speak.
But time will tell, I'm not on any mission to pretend that Steam is the one and only viable platform and that a 30% cut is the only possible way. I'm simply concerned about these new stores that try to compete with a large discount while (some) people seams to assume that the service will be the same or better. Because I've seen this very same thing happening in my own sector and quality went down the drain as a result but then games might be different than finance so I might just be a grumpy old man here :)
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