Steam recently launched voice chat and group features somewhat similar to Discord, but it seems like Discord has a reply for Steam as well. Discord is all set to step into the video games sales business from Thursday as it debuts it online store in Canada, which includes free games with a paid membership, and ofcourse a digital store.
As Variety reports, the client will also be getting a universal game launcher with which players will be able to launch ANY game via the client itself.
“We’ve actually been mulling the idea for a long time,” Discord chief marketing officer Eros Resmini, told Variety via email. “We wanted to build an amazing platform that people wanted to use every day and we wanted to grow that platform before focusing too much on monetization. We now have 150 million users, so timing felt right. We knew we didn’t want to sell ads or user data, so we had two options left: cosmetics or content. Nitro was our attempt at cosmetics, now we’re adding games to that subscription and building a retail store too.”
The store will be initially exclusive to 50,000 random users in Canada, who will be able to enjoy the paid membership, aka Nitro, perks as well. Eros further added that” “We hope to slowly expand the beta to test different markets, currencies, prior to full launch later this year.”
The Nitro subscribers will have access to the following games: “Saints Row: The Third,” “Metro: Last Light Redux,” “Darksiders: Warmastered Edition,” “De Blob,” “Tormentor X Punisher,” “Dandara,” “Kathy Rain,” “GoNNER,” “Kingdom: New Lands,” “System Shock Enhanced Edition,” and “Super Meat Boy.”
The retail store will initially sell the following games: “Dead Cells,” “Frostpunk,” “Omensight,” “Into the Breach,” “SpellForce 3,” “The Banner Saga 3,” “Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire,” “Hollow Knight,” “Moonlighter,” “This is the Police 2,” and “Starbound.”