Discord Store — Discord's Steam competitor, a store for games 🕹

HUGE launch from Discord, a "Slack for gamers" that's taking off. Back in late 2017, it was reported that 1.5M people are joining every week. Wow. Today they just launched a beta of their game store, a direct take on PC gaming giant, Steam. From their blog post: Today, we’re slowly rolling out a beta test to about 50,000 of our Canadian players and will be expanding to more over time. These players will see an upgraded version of Discord Nitro that has access to a curated selection of games along with the current subscription perks. They’ll also see a new Discord Store tab in the home screen with individual games for purchase. Having worked in the gaming industry prior to Product Hunt, I know how hard distribution is in the industry. Discord's achieved a scale that can make a big impact for indie and big name game companies. Curious to hear peoples' thoughts on this. Is Discord the new Steam?

This is so huge. Finally, Steam has a competitor. Finally, Valve will start thinking about user experience inside Steam app. A few days ago I asked our business developer to get in touch with Valve Steam team in order to learn from their experience building the community around games, that could be used to improve community experience in @Setapp. But now there is another smart kid on a block.

Compared to Steam, I believe Discord has a much more interesting dynamic when they bring games to the massively engaged communities and squads, and not vice versa. Steam's bet to foster community aspect has always felt like an after-thought and never shined outside of Workshop.

Discord is an amazing product. No doubt this will be a serious competitor in the online game store market. Excited to see how this plays out!

"Bold move, let's see how it pans out." Jokes aside, it will be interesting to see Discord moving into a "platform for gaming in general" direction. I hope this kindles the fire of competition on existing platforms (looking at you, Steam), that seem to have stopped innovating in 2012 (or whenever Steam Greenlight got released).

Nice product! Curious if they will be rolling out a wallet and tokens anytime soon?

This is incredibly well executed - discord shows again that they can innovative like no other and not dillute the UX. Hope that they can bring this to mobile for discovery for mobile games too. Great job discord, excited to see what the future holds for you all.

As an avid Discord user I love that this incredible team (Disclosure: I am friends with many of the devs) is finding more ways to monetize its free product. I want Discord to succeed so badly but was always worried about how they will monetize without ads which I believe @jasoncitron said he would never do. The subscription was a great follow-up to grab some positive traction towards long-term viability. But now I know they are serious about making Discord continue to pump out great features and expand their reach within the gamer community by including a Gaming Store to create competition towards Steam, Origin, GoG, etc. I was always impressed that such a small company could develop and deploy features to their free app so quickly while utilizing cutting-edge web tech. Shout out to Jason, Mallory, Andrei, Stanislav, and all the great minds behind Discord <3 P.S. Thank you for finally including text-chat in the overlay. Absolute game changer.

Great work! I'm tired of steams cluttered UI, I'm exited to try this out.

Perfect, we need more competition with Steam, because it would improve gaming community.

not good I would say. they would take drastic actions without informing us about it which is unethical and act of carelessness. My account got disabled saying that I broke their rules where I was in mid absent prior. I was on and off, and I know fully that I hadn't broken any rules. Even if I had done something, they should've warn me about it first by a mail. they could've warned me first instead taking my whole account over. I have lost all of my contacts because of it. A mail was sent "after" my account got disabled. It got disabled on 25th of December, the same day users I'm familiar with lost access to their discord account too!!

shots fired

Next up: Discord launches Live Streaming and VOD to take on Twitch and YouTube Gaming.

Stunning

so unshitified steam

This is dead/abandoned. Only people who bought games can still access