The battle for your game dollars and storefront participation is on, and we’re not sad to see the competition heating up, finally.
At GDC this week, Valve announced that it’s bringing a slew of new features to Steam, including Steam Events, which sounds like a big upgrade over the current event setup; that just alerts you as events in your followed games begin. The new events feature looks more like a calendar, or an agenda, with “personalized” information about ongoing events, broadcasts, and upcoming tournaments. Plus, the library is getting a full redesign (oh my goodness, finally) with the activities plan in mind. The events stuff should be live for everyone later in 2019.
That’s in addition to the user reviews revamp the company unveiled last week.
Meanwhile, Discord is also up to some stuff that, as Popdog developer Avi Bhuiyan pointed out on Twitter, has flown “remarkably under the radar.” It’s offering verified servers for game developers and allowing devs to create their own store channels to better sell their games, which is pretty much a big clue that the Discord Store itself wasn’t doing that great and might be on the way out, no doubt thanks to the entry of other players in the storefront market – like Epic and now Google. But the key bit, as Bhuiyan argues, is that Discord appears to be shifting its stance on monetizing user metrics. Here’s Discord:
“Moreover, we’ve learned that devs want better insights for their games. These insights allows devs to optimize their game development, marketing campaigns, and community activations which ultimately makes better game experiences for players. So, some analytics are already live and some are coming soon for devs making use of our commerce tools. Use these insights to understand how much salt you need to add to your gamezpacho.”
What does it all mean? Discord is:
– likely struggling with monetization (the Discord Store is no more)
– really, REALLY good at PR
– still standing by its principle to not sell its users
– experimenting with selling to gamedevs (and not just their own users)— Avi Bhuiyan (@esportsguy) March 21, 2019
