World’s biggest gaming chat platform, Discord, takes aim at Steam with game store

A look at Discord’s main
interface.
Screenshot / Business
Insider

• The world’s largest chat platform for gaming, Discord,
  has over 150 million users.
• On Thursday, the company announced a new digital
  storefront for games — a major move aimed at taking on the
  biggest game store in the world, Steam.
• Discord’s store is limited to start, with only a small
  handful of games from a few publishers.

With over 150 million users, Discord is the world’s largest
gaming chat platform. 

Though the service is used by lots of different groups, the focus
for Discord is gaming: It offers both text and voice chat. On
Thursday morning, that service expands into an entirely new area
— Discord is opening a digital game storefront.

That’s an especially big deal because of Discord’s huge user
numbers — it’s one of the few services online that has a large
enough gaming audience to reasonably take on the Valve-owned
gaming juggernaut Steam, the world’s largest game store. 

Chances are, if you’ve bought a game on a PC or Mac in the last
decade, you bought it on Steam. The service boasts over 200
million users — and it has no real competition. 

That said, it sounds like Discord doesn’t intend to take on Steam
directly — at least not at first.

As the company said in a press release on Thursday morning, the
Discord Store is intended as a “kind of cozy neighborhood book
shop,” but for games instead of books.

New
York City’s famous Strand Book Store is both gigantic and
cozy.
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty
Images

More specifically, the Discord Store aims to curate a group of
games that come with personal recommendations. Rather than the
firehose approach that digital stores like Steam and the Apple
App Store take, Discord intends to recommend and sell only “the
hottest and newest games.” 

For starters, the storefront is pretty slim on offerings — just
under a dozen games are up for sale as of Thursday. They are as
follows:

• “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”
• “Starbound”

Moreover, only 50,000 randomly chosen Discord users in Canada
will be able to access the store in its “beta” period.

Discord promises availability will grow over time, but it’s not
clear when the storefront will exit beta and open up to all of
the service’s hundreds of millions of users.