After we upsorbed the Discord Game Store into your computer chat program, we received a lot of feedback and learnings about what players and developers really want. We’ve learned so much that we’re evolving in a big big way. Super glue yourself in because we’re shakin’ this timeline up.

Major Key Learnings

One major thing reinforced during our store beta is how much developers like building communities on Discord, and how much players like hanging out in Verified Servers.

We know that building and engaging a community of superfans on Discord is becoming more and more important to a game’s success. Furthermore, we’ve learned that developers want more agency over their monetization and less friction between their community and their commerce.

To better serve the needs of both players and developers, we’re evolving Verified Servers to include enhanced community options and commerce tools.

Verified Servers for Game Devs

Starting now, we’re mixing in some tapioca starch and thickening up Verified Servers for devs in a big way. For a small development fee, devs will have access to store channels and news channels. Once approved, they’ll receive a verified checkmark, get vanity perks, and appear in server discovery.

Integrating Commerce and Community

We’ve learned that devs want to avoid the friction and cost of a traditional storefront by selling directly to their community. So, you can now create a store channel within your server where anyone can get your game.

rare image of Verified Servers mega evolution (the store channel)

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. Sign up for our dev newsletter to stay up to date on this.

revenue section of our analytics dashboard

acquisition section of our analytics dashboard

Moremoreover, we’ve learned that devs want more ways to engage with their community. Sooo, tidy up your menu items because you can now designate any channel a news channel (like #announcements) and share updates to your players’ Activity Feed.

GLOSSARY MOMENT: The Activity Feed is Discord’s “homepage.” As a player, it shows news for games you play, what your friends have been up to, and who’s playing games right now in case you wanna join in!

More specifically, you can elect to push any post containing a link to the Activity Feed of all Discord users who play your game, not just to the people in your server. To clarify, this news only reaches people who are engaged with your server/game.

Lifecycle: Pre-Alpha to Post-Launch to Post-Lunch

Another big brain thing we’ve learned is that devs are using Discord to run early tests of their games to small audiences. These alpha and beta groups then turn into the foundation of healthy communities that are hyped about a game and geared up to purchase on launch day.

Soooo, leverage our existing permission features and store channels to manage your game through its entire lifecycle inside Discord.

Here’s an example timeline of what you can do:

Closed Alpha and Beta — invite specific users to your server and grant store channel access via server roles for testing.

Open Beta — build a wider community of early adopters and evangelists.

Early Access — sell your game during late-stage development to superfans.

Launch — in-server commerce allows you to sell directly to fans where they hang out at a 90/10 rev split.

Post-Launch — sell your IAP/DLC in your server and keep your commerce and fans all in one place during long-tail development.

Lunch — get down on a panini ya weenie 🍔

Emulsify Your Community

As said earlier, we know that building and engaging a community of super-fans on Discord is becoming more and more vital to a games success. Take advantage of features that let you elevate your community engagement to new heights. Once approved, you’ll have access to:

Verified Server Cosmetics — make a memorable server name like discord.gg/mysickgame and upload some awesome art to make your server stand out like a really tall person amongst people who are less than the height of the really tall person.

Server Discovery — your server will be discoverable to Discord’s 250 million registered players within the server discovery directory. It’s like a treasure hunt except you’re the beautiful shiny treasure.

Gifting — leverage our gifting system and let your fans drop click-to-redeem gift links across the world wide webwork.

dramatic interpretation of “friendship”

Discord Tech Pancake Stack

Finally final, we know that building games is time consuming. Soooooo, log into GitHub because our engineers built a lot of cool tools to make devs’ lives easier.

Use our SDK to save time and power your games. Examples of this are below and check this cool other thing with words to learn more about these words below.

Networking and lobbies

Voice chat. Hey, Discord is pretty good at that (works on any platform as long as Discord is running).

Couponing system and price control

Cloud Saves

Rich Presence — let players show off their game status with rich information about what character they’re playing as, what level they’re in, or how much match time has elapsed (among other things. The world is your okonomiyaki).

calories: enough

How to Get Started

You can get started on many of these things without needing us to verify or approve. Head over to the Discord Dev Portal to start. After paying the development fee, you’ll get immediate access to pre-launch lifecycle tools. You can also begin integrating our SDK for Rich Presence and more.

Then, you’ll see a required checklist to complete prior to submitting for approval. Once you submit, our team will review your server, your game, and your store pages.

After being verified, you’ll have access to our commerce tools. Sell your game, allow gifting, see analytics, and surface in Server Discovery!

Some Finishing Salt

With game commerce shifting to communities, we’ve decided to replace the store tab with our Nitro games catalogue. For players, finding and buying games now happens through servers. Your library remains untouched by these changes.

We’re really super excited to open the gates, release our tools, and enable devs to control their own destiny in the same way they control building their communities. Take advantage of this tasty gazpacho by heading here.

Sign up to our developer newsletter to stay up to date on who when what.