Earlier this year, Discord rolled out a Steam-like Games Tab hub. Today, the VOIP app has announced it will start selling games.
As reported by Variety, a store beta will be offered to 50,000 Canadian s—who will be selected at random via the platform's Discord Nitro subscription service.
A new tab named the Discord Store will become available to those s—where individual games can be purchased—alongside a suite of free games, which will include the likes of Saints Row: The Third, System Shock Enhanced Edition, Metro: Last Light and Super Meat Boy at launch. The first games on the store comprise Into the Breach, Hollow Knight, Dead Cells and Frostpunk.
Bad North will be a launch title for the initiative, arriving on Steam, GOG and other platforms after the exclusivity period ends. Variety says the universal library will allow s to launch any game on their computer via Discord—it sounds similar to how Steam boots up other launchers and games.
Chatting to Variety, Discord's chief marketing officer Eros Resmini says: "We’ve actually been mulling the idea for a long time. 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 s, so timing felt right. We knew we didn’t want to sell ads or 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."
It's not clear how long the beta will run, but we've reached out to Discord itself and will report back when we know more.
