When games are published on Steam, the developer gets 70% of the revenue with the other 30% going to Valve. Epic made headlines in the beginning of the month by offering developers 88% of the revenue of games published on its new Epic Games Store. Today, Discord announced that starting next year, developers will receive 90% of the revenue for games sold on its platform.
Discord revealed its plans this morning in a blog post writing, “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.” Discord’s store opened up in beta in October and allows developers to self-publish on the platform. Discord’s platform also offers verified servers.
Later in the post Discord wrote, “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.”
[Source: Discord]
Our Take
I don’t think Steam needs to be too nervous – the platform isn’t going anywhere, but I bet proclamations like this from Epic and Discord are prompting it to consider re-evaluating its revenue split. A lot of these details are behind-the-scenes issues that don’t directly affect us consumers too much, but I’m curious to see how all of these stores pivot and change.
