Discord is a ubiquitous platform at this point. As a chat service primarily dedicated to gaming and streaming, the application ꦉhas made a big name for itself in recent years. However, one endeavor from the company behind the service might not be doing so hot: games publishing.
Around 2018, Discord began to tout itself as an alternative to Steam. Notably, the company - an a🌜ggressive strategy that curried favor with developers big and small. An anonymous source, who's published with the company, spoke highly of "better, more com🅘petitive rates" to us.
But that might not have been enough. , , it's been unclear what the company's direction in regards to publishing might be. As it turns out, that direction m꧙ight be non-existent, as the company appears to be moving awa🧜y from publishing altogether.
Our source pointed us to the exits of Andy Swanson and Anita Brey - two key players in Discord's p💙ublishing arm. and both announced their departures on LinkedIn five days ago. Their exit was preempted by , whose goal seems to be on growing out Discord as purely software-focused enterprise.
These are all moves that, while unfortunate, make t🌜otal sense. Competing with a monolith like Steam was never going to be an eaꦏsy task, and with the continued success of platforms like Epic Games Store and GOG, it makes sense that Discord's publishing endeavors didn't pan out. At the end of the day, Discord is a place where people go to talk, not buy games.
Of course, this preempts any sort oꦆf official announcement from the company. We'll be reaching out to Discord to ask if their publishing endeavors are dead in t🌼he water.
Howeve𒁏r, the writing definitely seems to be on the wall.