"Our mission is to bring people together around games," Citron says, Currently, its user base that is presently scattered around a number of different services: buying here, talking there, playing in yet a third. The store, alongside the Nitro subscription, will hopefully help Discord turn a profit.īut there's a less immediate play as well: to further position Discord as an all-in-one destination for gaming on the PC. Not only are its chat and messaging services free, but unlike many social platforms, Discord doesn't serve ads to its users. The obvious aim here is to monetize Discord-a company that, other than revenue from its Nitro subscribers, seems to be funded largely by investment money. "Our approach to the actual storefront is going to be more like a neighborhood bookstore," Citron says, "with curated selections of titles that we think you'll really want to play that you might have overlooked." The initial slate includes Dead Cells, Frostpunk, and Hollow Knight, and the company will likely continue to prioritize so-called "triple-i" indies-those that attempt to create experiences comparable to larger, corporate-backed titles. (The founders were all ex-game developers.) The new shop will be positioned similarly. Games have always been central to Discord's feature rollout, and various small touches, like gaming-related memes that run as messages when the program starts, reinforce the idea of Discord as a service created by and for the gaming community. Citron hopes the store will allow the social functions of Discord, which already allow users to see what their friends are playing, to facilitate that process-turning community interest into sales. "Ultimately, the reason why we think there's an opportunity for us is that most of the time when I find games to play or observe how people find those games, it's based on what their friends are playing," says Jason Citron, the company's CEO and co-founder. It's exactly that discovery issue that Discord is seeking to address.
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