There's a burgeoning cold war between digital stores of late. The most recent development of this is when Epic Games, the studio behind Fortnite, released its own digital store to rival Valve's Steam, with a much more attractive revenue policy for developers.
As opposed to Steam's 70-30 split, Epic Games says it's giving developers 88 percent and will cut only 12 percent of game sales, an offer most especially attractive to smaller studios with lesser-known independent games. However, Discord just took things to a whole new other level.
Discord Fuels Digital Store War Even Further
In an attempt to make its digital store the friendliest of all to developers, Discord just announced that it will offer them a 90 percent share of the revenue from game sales when its store officially launches to all creators next year. Discord's store first opened in October with a select few games, most of them indies. Right now, Discord operates under the 70-30 split, but that'll change pretty soon.
"Turns out, it does not cost 30 percent to distribute games in 2018," said CEO Jason Citron in a blog post over at Medium. "After doing some research, we discovered that we can build amazing developer tools, run them, and give developers the majority of the revenue share."
Revenue Policies
More importantly, Discord says that it's new revenue policy will apply to all developers, regardless of their size. That means major and independent studios both get a 90 percent cut of the profits. Steam, on the other hand, recently overhauled its revenue system to incentivize games that do well — for games that earn over $10 million, Steam will take the standard 30 percent. But if that game earns between $10 million and $50 million, Steam will take just 25 percent. Then for every sale after the first $50 million, Steam will take just 20 percent.
The change angered a lot of creators and developers. Some of them argued that it would hurt smaller-scale developers and studios in favor of bigger studios that churn out AAA titles.
Discord, meanwhile, says it's going to try and lower its fees even further going forward.
"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," said Citron. "[W]e'll explore lowering [fees] by optimizing our tech and making things more efficient."
Thoughts on Discord's new revenue policy? As always, feel free to sound off in the comments section below!
