The Discord Store Beta

Steam on the other hand regularly tries to convince me that I am in fact not logged into the store despite being logged into the app (how do you even do that?).

Discord consumes a lot of memory. Steam makes my computer lag while not using as much memory.

Overall, I'd say Discord is a tiny bit better in the department of "not sucking" than Steam.

They must have looked at Discord when they were evaluating Curse, given that they suggested the purpose of Curse was to help build community (though curse was originally a distribution mechanism for mods and add-ons that added community as afterthought, in my subjective opinion). I imagine someone at Amazon is kicking his or herself for the choice today..

Personally I am not a big fan of the new steam chat UX, looks ugly

I'm curious to see how the social stickiness of Discord will affect their foray into a games/app store. I believe that, for multiplayer games at least, people first fire up the way they want to talk with their friends and then set about playing a game. From there, you grow the product into managing and buying your games.

If Discord provides some differentiated social benefits to the games bought through their store, then I could see this doing quite well.

They may not be able to build a better game store platform than Steam, but they might fit into building a better curated store.

They are the best chat client around right now IMHO, beating out all the enterprise apps (slack, hipchat, etc) particularly if you want a fantastic client on all 3 OS.

You have game developers like Blizzard, EA, and Epic who all have their own Steam-like platforms on PC where they distribute their titles. Arguably these platforms are more popular than Steam, if only because of the popularity of the titles they own.

You have popular games that distribute outside of these platforms, like League of Legends and Guild Wars.

And you have other studio-unassociated storefronts, like Humble Bundle, Twitch, GoG. Yes, I'm aware GoG is owned by CD Projekt Red, but it's a generic storefront not just for their games, and they distribute their games elsewhere, so it resembles Steam more than it does Battle.net.

The PC gaming space is ridiculously diverse and there is room for competition. There's also a lot of value I can see arising here in the indie space; if Nitro becomes a "Netflix for Indie Games" type subscription, that's something relatively unique (Humble is close, but has a curation problem). Combine that with the huge curation and discovery problem Steam has, and possibly some strategic partnerships with Humble or CD Projekt Red, and it'd be a huge win for small developers and gamers alike.

No, you just need to draw people to your game platform. And Discord already has people on their game platform. Discord has the active attention of millions of gamers throughout the day. It's just not selling games yet.

This is a horizontal integration play and a very smart one IMO. Before this move, Steam had game sales and weak social; Discord dominated social and no game sales. Now, Discord dominates social and will sell games, at least to some of their millions of customers.

Social features are much more of a defensible "moat" because they depend on network effects and are difficult to "manufacture" relative to other features. In this sense, Discord has a massive head start on Steam. Discord only needs to catch Steam in terms of game sales, whereas Steam needs to catch Discord in terms of social.

This is just one more account to keep in mind, though it looks like it's more of a rental model than a purchase model.

For instance, I released recently (in my mind) a pretty nice and functional app for Android. Not getting much traction, but that's fine, I wasn't totally expecting that. Where my problem lies is that, a large part of the mobile market, those on iOS, don't get to have the app. As their storefront costs $100 yearly to publish to. On top of requiring a Mac to develop on (easily in the thousands of dollars).

I feel that the barriers of entry for developing (and publishing) applications and games should be lower, and rather instead of introducing these fees that won't do anything to people that have money and just want to release their broken asset store mashup onto a storefront. In my mind, the best solution would be better moderation and curation.

I like Discord a lot, and to be fair, their people have publicly claimed here and elsewhere that they have no intention to sell the information. Unfortunately, those statements have no teeth.

While they state the same in their privacy policy (in non-binding form about intent), the same privacy policy goes on to specifically allow sale and transfer of user data.

See "OUR DISCLOSURE OF YOUR INFORMATION" here: https://discordapp.com/privacy

The difference is that the privacy policy is a legal acknowledgement end users must accept before they use the software. The forum/blog statements and non-binding language we read everywhere else are just 'feel good' things for users to hear and for their employees to tell themselves.

If they just wanted protection against an accidental slippage of data then that privacy page could be changed substantially. Instead, they pave the road for the explicit sale of data at a later time.

Ideally they would deny it in current policy if they have no intent of selling the information. They could leave the option open to change in the future with a "this privacy policy is subject to change" clause, but clauses like this only have teeth if there is also a clause that ensures future policy changes won't apply retroactively to historically collected data without opt-in after the policy change.

But this weakens their position in an eventual acquisition by some company who finds monetary value in that data.

As it stands right now, in an eventual acquisition or even just some internal shifts of philosophy in the organization, all historical data is up for grabs for any potential use.

In what way would any of this be distracting to you?