A new player in the video game sales business is betting that a smaller marketplace of curated titles will win, helping customers cut through the clutter of an overcrowded ecosystem.

Discord, a popular software service that lets 150 million gamers communicate through chat, text, audio and video, announced in August that its new online store will feature games picked by staff and eventually community input. The goal is to create "almost a local boutique bookstore experience that's highly curated," said Discord CMO Eros Resmini.

Founded in 2015, the company enters the digital distribution space as the video game industry continues to grow rapidly. Globally, gamers are expected to spend around $138 billion on games in 2018, up 13.3 percent from the previous year, according to Newzoo. The market research firm projects PC games will likely bring in around a quarter of that revenue.

Currently, Valve Corp.'s digital storefront Steam dominates the PC market for buying games with an enormous selection. Technology news website Ars Technica estimates approximately 23,000 games are currently available on the platform, and third-party tracking site Steam Spy reports that more than 6,000 games have been added in 2018 alone.

"It strikes me as being a lot like what YouTube and Facebook and other tech companies are dealing with, where there's an incredible amount of content and they don't know how to surface it to the right people," said Brendan Sinclair, an editor at GamesIndustry.biz. "The industry standard is to rely on algorithmic curation, but it's competitors looking to do new things that are trying to use human curation as almost a selling point."

The number of games published to Steam doesn't seem to be slowing, particularly as Valve announced in June that it would allow everything onto the store that was not "illegal, or straight up trolling." At the same time, Steam is actively adding ways users can tweak their experience to find games they want to play. A September blog post detailed new features that allow users to follow specific developers and publishers, as well as more comprehensively filter out content they don't to see. Steam also has long offered a community feature that allow users to follow external curators such as news outlets or YouTubers for recommendations, but almost anyone can become one of these curators.

The platform's low barriers to entry benefit smaller developers trying to get their games out to the wider community. However, content can easily get lost among the vast selection depending on how the algorithm surfaces results. "For a company like Steam, it's almost an impossible problem because there are too many worthy games being released to feature all of them appropriately," Sinclair said.