Discord says its PC game store will offer a 90/10 revenue split when it opens for all game developers in 2019
The video game industry is witnessing the death of the standard revenue split for distribution platforms. For years, stores like Steam have taken 30 percent of every sale.
Context & Ripple Effects
Discord is attacking the one number that defined PC game distribution: the 30% cut stores like Steam have taken on every sale. Its answer, announced ahead of the store opening to all developers in 2019, is a 90/10 split that leaves the platform with just a tenth of each sale. The move lands on ground Microsoft had already softened — its April 2018 policy giving app developers up to a 95% share of Store revenues was announced before Discord's store even opened, though games were carved out of it.
What makes this worth watching is how the pressure compounds over time rather than resolving in one announcement: Microsoft later cuts its own PC game take to 12%, and by 2024 Discord itself retreats from the flat 90/10 model toward a tiered structure that halves its fee only for a developer's first $1M in sales.
First-order effects
- Game developers shipping on PC in 2019 get a credible second storefront priced at 90/10, making Steam's long-standard 30% cut look expensive by direct comparison.
- Valve faces its first head-on price challenge at the distribution layer, since Discord can subsidize the thin margin with revenue from its broader chat and community business.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft is forced to keep repricing: after initially excluding games from its developer-friendly Store terms, it eventually drops its PC game cut from 30% to 12% explicitly 'to compete with Steam' — evidence the undercut spread from challenger to incumbent platforms.
- Developers gain negotiating leverage across every storefront, as the 30% default stops being a fixed cost of doing business and becomes a rate each platform has to justify.
Third-order effects
- Flat platform splits give way to tiered, volume-based fee structures — Discord's own 2024 shift to charging 15% only on the first $1M in cumulative gross sales shows even the original disruptor converging on graduated pricing rather than a headline rate.
- If the pattern holds, distribution margin stops being a moat for PC storefronts, pushing competition toward what sits around the store — community, subscriptions, bundling — rather than the checkout percentage itself.
The trend: PC game distribution is moving from a fixed 30% industry standard toward competitive, tiered platform fees set by whoever needs developers most.