Discord plans to outdo Valve and Epic with a higher developer revenue split in its Game Store in 2019

[Beskamir]

9 hours ago, handymanshandle said:

I'd say "Dunno how Discord got the money to run a games store" but then again they had the power to do this:

They're selling everyone's data and they've got access to a lot of it. For instance you know the feature that lets you show which games you're playing on mobile? Yeah that lets them see what apps your using which they can then sell to advertisers. Google's only got data from android while discord's potentially got data from both android and ios.

[Guest]

Quote

“Turns out, it does not cost 30 percent to distribute games in 2018,” Discord CEO Jason Citron explained in a blog post.“After doing some research, we discovered that we can use the internet to distribute games, and it's actually all automatic - nothing really needs doing at all on our end. It's actually free. Curation is just too limiting in 2018 anyway."

 

Quite suddenly Jason went further, "Haha yeah, turns out people just put their games on steam as it was the same price for a bigger audience. Please sell your games with us so we can finally get some money. Everyone who has discord must check out this tab some time or another, lets finally put something there worth downloading."

 

[ZacoAttaco]

This what happens when a company like Valve, dominates a market for so long with little to no innovation, competitors start to creep up because suddenly there's no more incentive for publishers to stay on Steam. First Ubisoft and EA, developed their own marketplaces, now Epic and Discord want to directly compete with Valve. Sadly, it seems some of the reasons people loved PC gaming are disappearing as the market is becoming more fragmented than ever.

[D13H4RD]

1 hour ago, ZacoAttaco said:

This what happens when a company like Valve, dominates a market for so long with little to no innovation, competitors start to creep up because suddenly there's no more incentive for publishers to stay on Steam. First Ubisoft and EA, developed their own marketplaces, now Epic and Discord want to directly compete with Valve. Sadly, it seems some of the reasons people loved PC gaming are disappearing as the market is becoming more fragmented than ever.

And we're slowly starting to see this problem. 

 

Competition is good for consumers but there is a point where it's just ridiculous. I don't want to download yet another launcher just for a couple of games from a certain publisher. I already have Steam, UPlay, Origin and Battle.net. I don't want another 2-3 just for a couple of games. 

 

We ultimately know why the Bethesda launcher and such exist, but too much is also a bad thing as it will be too fragmented and confusing not only to consumers but also to developers as to which storefront to put on if they can't justify putting their game on all storefronts. 

[suicidalfranco]

I'm going to stay on the same page as I was in the Epic store thread:

> Steam actively pushes for steamplay

> Steamplay initiative brought more games that I could have ever wished for to Linux

> Valve only one of this store pushing for making Linux gaming viable

> Valve can get all of my game money for all I care.

[asus killer]

32 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

I'm going to stay on the same page as I was in the Epic store thread:

> Steam actively pushes for steamplay

> Steamplay initiative brought more games that I could have ever wished for to Linux

> Valve only one of this store pushing for making Linux gaming viable

> Valve can get all of my game money for all I care.

ripping the developers of 30%, Valve should even go to your house and clean the floors.

[suicidalfranco]

22 minutes ago, asus killer said:

ripping the developers of 30%

compared to the times when Steam started out:

> releasing a game could only be done through publishing houses

> publishers split used to be around 50% to 60% revenue split (for the publishers)

> Indie games being practically inexistent, outside of some fringe sharewares

> Brick and mortars stores asking even more money just to give you a good shelf

 

30% share valves take is almost nothing compared to all the services and tools they also provide to developers:

> Steamworks

> Steamworks provides networking and player authentication tools for both server and peer-to-peer multiplayer games

> matchmaking services

> support for Steam community friends and groups

> Steam statistics and achievements

> integrated voice communications

> Steam Cloud support

> anti-cheating devices and digital copy management

> And again: Steamplay

> And F*, for how much i hate it, even the ability to simply sell uncomplete, beta or alpha state games

> And ability to release updates for their games on the fly with no added costs

[ZacoAttaco]

2 hours ago, D13H4RD said:

And we're slowly starting to see this problem. 

 

Competition is good for consumers but there is a point where it's just ridiculous. I don't want to download yet another launcher just for a couple of games from a certain publisher. I already have Steam, UPlay, Origin and Battle.net. I don't want another 2-3 just for a couple of games. 

 

We ultimately know why the Bethesda launcher and such exist, but too much is also a bad thing as it will be too fragmented and confusing not only to consumers but also to developers as to which storefront to put on if they can't justify putting their game on all storefronts. 

It's actually kind of ironic. Most of the tech industry is criticized for being 'too monopolistic'. Look at companies like Amazon and Facebook who just acquire any potential competitors with little to not interference from authority. It's definitely not the cause with the ever fragmented PC gaming landscape.

 

@suicidalfranco did bring up an interesting point. With the community having more and more disdain towards Windows, Steam could gain more market share with their recent push towards Linux compatibility. That is an initiative that their competitors would struggle to match.

 

Side note, for Bethesda too, they didn't have to grant refunds on their own platform like they would have had to if they were on Steam. I could imagine a lot of unhappy Fallout 76 owners wanting refunds, yet, they were out of luck on Bethesda Net.

[williamcll]

It's gonna be like subscription TV/Online Videos again.

 

Which in turn promotes piracy.

[iLostMyXbox21]

Can we just appreciate that itch.io can be 100% to the dev and none to them if you want? Literally there is a setting that lets you change how much they get, but you can simply set it up to where you get it all

 

 

[RejZoR]

On 12/18/2018 at 10:05 AM, suicidalfranco said:

compared to the times when Steam started out:

> releasing a game could only be done through publishing houses

> publishers split used to be around 50% to 60% revenue split (for the publishers)

> Indie games being practically inexistent, outside of some fringe sharewares

> Brick and mortars stores asking even more money just to give you a good shelf

 

30% share valves take is almost nothing compared to all the services and tools they also provide to developers:

> Steamworks

> Steamworks provides networking and player authentication tools for both server and peer-to-peer multiplayer games

> matchmaking services

> support for Steam community friends and groups

> Steam statistics and achievements

> integrated voice communications

> Steam Cloud support

> anti-cheating devices and digital copy management

> And again: Steamplay

> And F*, for how much i hate it, even the ability to simply sell uncomplete, beta or alpha state games

> And ability to release updates for their games on the fly with no added costs

This. 30% sounds a lot only if you're a greedy bastard given they take care of all the infrastructure and frameworks. Imagine doing all that yourself, hiring servers, hosting them, providing homepage, bandwidth, uptime, anticheat system, all the fiddly networking things etc. And in the end, promotion. On Steam, chances are, ppl will find the game by pure chance. How likely is that to happen if all you have is a webpage and promotions you make on your own? And if you happen to make a successful product that has 1 million income. That's 300k to Valve and 700k to you. I'd say the split sounds perfectly reasonable for the service they provide.

 

I'm surprised ppl don't complain over taxes. State/gov takes like 20% cut for contributing literally absolutely nothing (unlike Valve which helps you as a dev hugely). But everyone's fine with it coz it's just a regular order... That's funny right?