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 PC storefront business at its single most defended term: the 30% cut that Steam normalized. Its answer is a 90/10 split when the store opens to all developers in 2019 — undercutting on take rate rather than features. The move lands weeks after Microsoft's April 2018 policy offering app developers up to a 95% cut of Store revenues, so Discord is not inventing price pressure on platform fees, it is extending it to the PC game market where Steam's share made the 30% standard feel untouchable.
What makes this worth tracking is how the pattern played out in the corpus: Microsoft went further on games specifically, cutting its Windows store take to 12% by August 2021 (explicitly framed as a bid to compete with Steam), while Discord itself later retreated from a flat low split toward a tiered model, halving a 30% fee to 15% only for developers' first $1M in cumulative sales (in June 2024 monetization changes).
First-order effects
- Game developers choosing where to list in 2019 get a concrete economic alternative to Steam's 30%, with Discord keeping just 10% of each sale.
- Discord converts its existing chat/community user base into storefront traffic, making distribution reach — not just the split — part of its pitch against incumbent stores.
Second-order effects
- Steam and other incumbents face direct pricing pressure on their 30% standard; Microsoft's subsequent 12% PC game cut shows rivals answering on take rate rather than ignoring the challenge.
- Developers gain negotiating leverage across all storefronts, since a credible low-fee channel weakens any single store's ability to hold the line on terms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the flat 30% platform tax erodes into tiered and negotiated splits — as seen in Discord's own later shift to a 15%-for-first-$1M structure — making take rate a competitive variable instead of an industry constant.
- Storefronts are pushed to justify their cut through services (discovery, community, payments) rather than gatekeeping alone, shifting power toward developers with audiences of their own.
The trend: PC game distribution is moving from a uniform 30% platform fee toward competitive, tiered take rates, with Discord's 90/10 split as an early forcing move.