Trion's DRM-free digital games shop Glyph is now open for business

Trion Worlds is launching its new digital distribution platform Glyph today in a bid to compete with established services like Steam and Origin by offering developers a smaller marketplace with a built-in audience: the millions of players who have to launch Glyph to play Trion titles like Rift. The company announced Glyph back in March, a week before GDC 2014, with the stated goal of curating a marketplace for digital goods and games. "Because we very intentionally have a smaller number of partners, we'll be able to pay far more attention to those partners," Trion Worlds CEO Scott Hartsman told Gamasutra in a recent phone call. "We're able to make sure that we don't add so many games to the platform that A, users have a bad game experience or B, developers get flooded out." Today the platform's online storefront officially opens for business, though Trion has been quietly transitioning the launchers for its games to Glyph for months. The digital storefront's opening lineup includes both Trion Worlds titles like Rift as well as third-party games like Stoic's The Banner Saga and the Early Access version of InXile's Wasteland 2. Notably, all single-player games sold through Glyph can be downloaded and played offline without additional DRM safeguards. Hartsman claims that Trion is looking to pursue a variety of partnership deals with developers going forward, from barebones sale agreements to co-marketing partnerships to crowdfunding and even full-on tech integration if developers want access to Trion's tools, including the in-game analytics platform that the company uses to track player behavior in MMO games like Rift.