It looks like Steam’s monopoly on the gaming store market is under attack. Both Epic and Discord have launched new revenue plans for game developers to incite them to publish games on their respective web stores rather than on Steam. Most recently, Discord has announced a 90/10 revenue split that competes with Valve. Shiok ah!
As it currently stands, Steam is taking a 30% cut of all the revenue that games brought in via Steam. Valve did announce that it will take a smaller percent of the game’s revenue once it hits a certain level of sales.
Enter Epic Game Store, who announced an 88/12 split between Epic and game publishers. And now, Discord has announced that they too will be pushing a competitive revenue scheme for game publishers. Specifically, a 90/10 split for self-published titles.
Discord elaborated on their thoughts in their company blog post:
Why does it cost 30% to distribute games? Is this the only reason developers are building their own stores and launchers to distribute games?
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.
So, starting in 2019, we are going to extend access to the Discord store and our extremely efficient game patcher by releasing a self-serve game publishing platform. No matter what size, from AAA to single person teams, developers will be able to self publish on the Discord store with 90% revenue share going to the developer. The remaining 10% covers our operating costs, and we’ll explore lowering it by optimizing our tech and making things more efficient.
Good on you Discord, for trying to do right by the publishers. Keep up the good work ah!
