Communications app turned games marketplace Discord has signed what might be its biggest deal yet, partnering with Take-Two-owned 2K Games.
The partnership starts with XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the remastered versions of the first two BioShock games, Civilization IV Complete and Mafia coming to Discord's Nitro subscription scheme, with further games expected to do the same in the coming months.
“We are super excited to bring some of 2K’s most popular games into Nitro,” Discord boss Jason Citron (pictured) said.
“Discord aims to provide players with the best content out there and this library of highly-regarded titles reflects that ongoing commitment. Our focus is to keep fostering passionate gaming communities so players and developers can always connect around the games that have brought them together.”
This is the biggest name that Discord has landed for its store to date but 2K hasn't exactly offered up some prime pieces of meat for the chat app to include in its subscription service. The most recent titles on offer here are the remastered editions of BioShock and BioShock 2, which launched in September 2016, and are updated versions of games rolled out in 2007 and 2010 respectively.
This is likely 2K testing the water and seeing what kind of audience Discord has with its marketplace. There's little to no indication of how this storefront is performing for the chat app. Given that the company has historically been very public about its success, namely its wildly growing user base, and we haven't heard a peep about the store's performance, it's likely things have been a bit quieter than Discord anticipated.
Discord announced its intention to launch a store on its platform back in August 2018 - something that PocketGamer.biz senior editor Craig Chapple predicted earlier in the year.
Said marketplace launched in October, with the company making changes to its premium Nitro subscription service. Where before this offered perks such as giving users the ability to fully customise their name, now it includes access to over 70 games out of the 111 titles that Discord's store boasts at the time of writing. As a result, the per-month cost rose from $4.99 to $9.99 to include this subscription option. Nitro Classic still exists for users who don't want to own games via Discord.
When it was first revealed, Discord's store had the typical 70/30 revenue split, but the firm said in December 2018 that developers would be keeping 90 per cent of cash from games sales moving forwards.
Discord boasts over 200m users.
