Chat-app Discord has launched their first major step in becoming a gaming marketplace today with the beta release of the Discord store, concurrently with Discord’s revamped Nitro subscription service.
Simply named the Discord Store, the app now provides Discord’s 150 million users the ability to buy PC games from the store, leveraging its massive userbase to offer what appears to be the most credible threat to Valve’s Steam service so far.
Alongside the store, Discord is also reintroducing its revamped Nitro service, which now grants subscribers access to a library of games in a manner similar to Microsoft’s Game Pass on Xbox One. Discord says that the current library adds up to $1000 worth of games and will grow larger as time goes on.
It will be interesting to see how Discord’s service evolves in the coming months, as the First on Discord service that provides publishing support to indie games in exchange for timed exclusivity is already receiving criticism for what fans call artificial delays. Discord plans to launch that initiative by this Fall.
