Better Revenue Shares for Devs All Around
In another effort to shake up the marketplace, Discord has declared a new revenue split for their game store. Starting next year, developers will take a 90% cut of all revenue generated by game sales on the platform. The news is more interesting in the context of recent announcements from Steam and Epic Games.
Steam recently announced better revenue shares for developers with higher-grossing titles. As many outlets and influencers noted, the change won’t apply to indie developers without lightning in a bottle. Hence, the 70/30 still applies to the vast majority of publishers on PC.
Discord, however, claims that every dev on their storefront shall enjoy the same rate of returns, no matter their sales performance. Starting next year, all developers on the young platform will see their shares rise from 70% to 90%.
“Turns out, it does not cost 30 percent to distribute games in 2018,” Discord CEO Jason Citron said in a blog post. “After doing some research, we discovered that we can build amazing developer tools, run them, and give developers the majority of the revenue share.”
“No matter what size, from AAA to single person teams, developers will be able to self publish on the Discord store with 90 percent revenue share going to the developer,” he continued. “The remaining 10 percent covers our operating costs, and we’ll explore lowering it by optimizing our tech and making things more efficient.”
Discord’s new sales split will be even more favorable to developers than the Epic Games Store, which launched last week with an exclusive lineup of indie titles. The Fortnite dev and publisher receives no more than a 12% cut of game revenue. As time goes on, it will be interesting to see how both the new storefronts affect the PC games market. Despite their updated revenue model, Valve can’t top the favorability of its new competitors.
What are your thoughts on Discord’s new revenue split? Do you think it will entice more developers to skip platforms? Let us know in the comments below.
SOURCE: The Verge