You can now buy games straight from a developer's Discord server

Developers can now sell games to players directly through their own Discord chat servers, following the latest update to the platform.

Devs can create a "store channel" within their server where players can click to buy games, in a change that will allow them to "avoid the friction and cost of a traditional storefront by selling directly to their community", the company said in a blog post this week.

The move will let devs easily manage alpha and beta tests by only inviting specific users to the store channel, Discord said.

In other changes, developers will be able to push news updates direct to the activity feeds of anybody that plays their game. They can now also gift games to users and add their own custom art to their servers.

You can read the full list of changes in the blog post.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.