A few days ago, Steam updated its user interface, giving it a much needed make over. Most people noticed that it looked a lot like Discord (a famous voice and text chat app), particularly when u send someone a message on the new Steam.
Now, Discord is taking a jab at Steam, and will start selling games, with the beta itself for the store being put up later today. For now it’ll be available for 50,000 users in Canada only, out of Discord’s 150 million userbase.
Curated List
Some of the games will be sold directly, just like Steam, while others will be bundled in a subscription service with Discord Nitro. However, unlike Steam, Discord is not aiming to amass a large number of games on its store. Instead, it’s aiming to offering a limited amount of “curated” games, aiming to be “one of those cozy neighborhood book shops”.
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Initially Discord Store beta is offering just 11 games. These include:
- Dead Cells
- Omensight
- Moonlighter
- Starbound
- Frostpunk
- SpellForce 3
- Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire
- Into the Breach
- This is the Police 2
- The Banner Saga 3
- Hollow Knight
Here’s what the store looks like in the beta:
Dedicating a whole section on the main dashboard of the app means that Discord Inc is serious about this venture, and will offer more games in the future.
Exclusives and Nitro
Another thing the company announced is that they’ll also feature “exclusives” of sorts on the game store. Select indie games will be exclusively available on the app for a set time (90 days or more), and will be launched later on, there are none available with the beta.
As mentioned earlier, some of the games will be available to Discord Nitro subscribers. Nitro enables animate emoji, offers bigger upload limits and a profile badge currently. Now it’ll also let you play a rotating set of games, kind of like Xbox Live or PlayStation Plus.
These games will be available with Discord Nitro initially:
- Metro: Last Light Redux
- De Blob
- Tormentor X Punisher
- Super Meat Boy
- Dandara
- Kathy Rain
- Saints Row: The Third
- System Shock Enhanced Edition
- Darksiders: Warmastered Edition
- GoNNER
- Kingdom: New Lands
Although these games aren’t exactly new or recent, they’re famous nonetheless and should be a good way to entice people into buying a Nitro subscription.
Dedicated Launcher
Lastly, Discord will also function as a game launcher, meaning that games installed on your computer can be launched directly from Discord. This also includes games that use a different launcher already (think Epic Games Launcher for Fortnite, Steam or Origin).
This is exactly what Steam does. Your move, Valve.
Via TechCrunch
