Starting with a slowly-ramping group of ~50,000 Canadians, Discord has begun distributing PC games. Specifically, there will be two services for paying members of the Discord Nitro beta program: a store, where games can be purchased as normal, and a library of other games that are available with the (aforementioned) Discord Nitro subscription.
“It’s kinda like Netflix for games.”
When talking about subscription services for video games, I am typically hesitant. That said, the previous examples were, like, OnLive, where they planned on making games that ran exclusively on that platform. The concern is that, when those games disappear from the service, they could be gone from our society as a whole work of art. (Consoles and DRM also play into this topic.)
In this case, however, it looks like they are just getting into curated, off-the-shelf PC games. While GoG holds its own, it will be nice to see another contender to Steam in the Win32 (maybe Linux?) games market. (I say Win32 because of the developer certification requirements for Windows Store / UWP.)
Dead horse rant aside, Discord is doing games… including a subscription service. Yay.
One more aspect to this story!
Over the last five-or-so years, Mozilla has been talking about upgrading their browser to use a more safe, multi-theaded, functional, job system, via their home-grown programming language, Rust. Turns out: Discord used this language for a lot of the store (and surrounding SDKs). Specifically, the native code for the store, the game SDK (with C, C++, and C# bindings), and the multiplayer network layer are all in Rust. This should make it fast and secure, which were the two design goals for Rust in the first place.
It was intended for web browsers after all…
