The Discord Blog announces a Discord Store Beta is now live, as the chat provider seeks to sow discord in the digital distribution world. This is rolling out today to about 50,000 Canadian Discord Nitro subscribers today. They have a couple of twists to offer compared to the competitions. Discord Nitro include a "curated" storefront to help with discovery and they will have some "first on Discord" exclusivity on select independent games. They explain they will also be providing a Universal Library tab to serve as a unified launcher that covers other game providers, just in time to interrupt the inevitable complaints about having to add another such service to your system. Here are some details:

Beyond Nitro — The Store
You ever been in one of those smaller boutique book shops with recommendations from employees written on little note cards? We love that hands-on personal approach to sharing great content with others. We think this kind of cozy neighborhood book shop vibe would be great for games. It reduces clutter and makes it easier to find what you want.

Alongside the upgraded Nitro, we’ll be launching a curated game store experience similar to one of those cozy neighborhood book shops with recommendations about the hottest and newest games from us to you.

The Discord Store Directory
We’ll be showcasing a variety of titles that we think you’ll like. As the store grows, we’ll rely on our community and our team to make the store feel super personal and focused on games that we genuinely think you’ll enjoy! Here’s an example of a Discord employee’s recommendation of Dead Cells:

For our store, we’re excited to announce we’ll be supporting “First on Discord” titles — indie games that we’ve helped bring to life. Supporting indie games pushes the boundary of creative game design and is important to innovation and the long term health of the industry. Of course, we think the games are really cool too!

To be very clear, First on Discord games are temporarily exclusive. They’re literally first on Discord — usually 90 days and then the developers can sell anywhere else they want. This beta won’t have any First on Discord titles, but we’ll be showing off some soon!

One Convenient Library
One more surprise for today! We know it’s frustrating to have a bunch of game launchers, so we’ll be adding a Universal Library tab to the Discord home screen as well.

If you want, Discord can scan your computer for games. Then, you’ll be able to launch any of your games through Discord even if they require another launcher (Discord will boot the other launcher and game). This way, you don’t have to worry about which game boots from where!