October 16, 2018 The Discord Games Store beta is now live for everyone.
In 2018, you have a lot of choices about where to buy your digital PC games, and now Discord has launched one more. The Discord Store has gone from private beta to public, which means you can buy games straight out of the voice chat app – or get a subscription to a library of existing titles.
Next time you load up Discord, you’ll find a new Store tab that works pretty much as you’d expect – you can browse games and buy them. The selection is pretty limited to start, though it’s buoyed by a handful of timed-exclusive ‘First on Discord’ titles, including Bad North and Minion Masters.
You can now also sign up for a slightly more expensive variation of Discord’s Nitro subscription for $9.99 monthly or $99.99 annually. In addition to the usual Nitro chat perks, this gets you access to a “growing library” of games, currently including titles like Soma, Torchlight 2, Inside, and Shadow Tactics. Excellent games, though you’ll likely already own more than a few of them.
This update also brings a ‘Universal Library,’ a feature which will scan your PC for games and let you launch them directly through Discord – another alternative if you’ve got games spread out across a variety of other stores.
One of the key points Discord emphasized in its original announcement is curation. “For many people like us, you grew up during a time when there were a relatively small amount of games being released. We remember devouring Nintendo Power, PC Gamer, and other various gaming mags to get a sense of the titles coming out.” To that end, games will be selected by curation team made up of Discord employees.
We began to suspect the app might move in this direction when we saw the Discord games tab, giving the service an initial selection of Steam-like features. Though with the Steam Chat update, turnabout certainly seems like fair play. As much as some of us may want to grouse about installing yet another game client, further competition for Valve has to be a good thing.