Discord Is Ending Nitro's Game Subscription Service but Will Still Sell Games

If you're a Discord Nitro subscriber, you have from now until October 15 to play the 90 or so games in the Nitro catalogue. After that date, Discord is ending the game subscription part of the Nitro service. The catalogue will have only lasted for a year. This won't mean Discord will stop selling games and won't affect any games already purchased through Discord—citing subscriber disinterest, the company is just doing away with the game catalogue offered through Nitro.

As it exists currently, the Discord Nitro games catalogue lets Nitro subscribers play dozens of games ranging from LucasArts classic The Dig to Frictional Games' Soma for no additional charge on top of the $9.99 USD monthly fee. Back in March, Discord replaced its games store tab with the Nitro catalogue and moved game sales pages into individual verified Discord servers for developers.

In the company's blog post about the removal of the catalogue, it highlighted other features added to the Nitro service over the past year and announced that it has doubled subscribers' maximum upload size to 100 megabytes while also cutting the number of boosts a server needs to unlock level 3 perks down to 20. The company is offering refunds to subscribers who wish to cancel because of the catalogue's decommissioning.

Discord doesn't own any of the games it provides access to through the catalog and would have to renew the contracts for any it wanted to keep offering. Citing disinterest, they're just not renewing any of them: "the truth is the vast majority of Nitro subscribers didn't play [the games]."

If you've purchased a game through Discord, this change to the Nitro service won't affect anything, and even though Discord is removing the catalogue that it replaced its store tab with, you'll still be able to purchase games through developer's servers. Discord offers developers 90 percent of the revenue from game sales on its platform, which remains more generous than the splits offered by the Epic Games Store and Steam.

Game subscription services don't necessarily need exclusive or brand new games to be successful, but that's one way to ensure that people pay attention to them. Microsoft's commitment to releasing all its first-party titles on Game Pass and Apple's sizeable launch catalogue for Apple Arcade reflect those companies' ambitions and market shares; their business models are worlds apart from Discord's. If you have Discord Nitro, you may want to look at what's being offered before it all goes away.