According to a company statement, Discord will be discontinuing service for its Universal Game Launcher and Game Library systems. Discord, which first released to the public in 2015, is one of the most popular services used by video game streamers currently available, and reportedly has over 250 million different users.
A few years after its reveal, the company also launched their own Discord game distribution store with a 90/10 revenue split for game developers, something which allowed creators a chance at far higher profits per title sold than competing PC game distribution services like Steam. Discord has always seemed keen to put itself into as many different aspects of game development as possible, with the company even teaming up with Microsoft to allow Discord service on Xbox Live. As ubiquitous as Discord is, however, apparently some of its features are becoming underused, and the company is ready to move on and try something new.
Thanks to a recent blog post on Discord’s official website, fans now know that the Universal Game Launcher, and game Library area which has housed the titles bought from Discord’s service, is being discontinued. According to the official message, the company is “removing both of these to keep your Discord experience fast and clean.” Fortunately, users who have purchased games from Discord won’t be losing access to them, as those players’ Libraries won’t be disappearing, although the option to disable them will now be available in the User Settings menu.
Discord has a history of dropping and adding in new programs in order to figure out what its users are most interested in utilizing, and the departure from its Universal Game Launcher and Library section represents the next phase of the program’s development. These aren’t the only things leaving Discord due to an apparent lack of use, either, as the company has also seen fit to completely remove the Activity Feed feature from the service, saying it was not doing what it was designed to do and instead only added unnecessary bulk.
While there are surely some fans who will miss launching their games exclusively from Discord, it seems as if the number of users who participated in these services just wasn’t high enough to justify keeping it around. There are already so many additional game launchers these days, and more and more developers like Rockstar Games are choosing to distribute their games themselves rather than split the profits with a distribution storefront like Steam. Hopefully, Discord will replace the service with something more of its users will appreciate.
