Your Place to Talk
Long time gamer favorite Discord recently announced that they will be pivoting their focus away from gaming and gamers. As described in their own blog update, video games are what sparked the creation. The competition, emotion, and feelings of a game are “why we originally created Discord: we wanted a simple and easy way to capture and enable these feelings we experienced growing up playing games with friends”
However, as Jason Citron, Founder/CEO of Discord, continues, while “[g]ames are what brought many of you on the platform...a lot of you realized, and vocalized, that you simply wanted a place designed to hang out and talk in the comfort of your own communities and friends.”
Which is exactly the direction Discord is going. Citron turns the topic to the update saying, “[a]s you’ve used Discord for more and more than playing games, our branding didn’t keep up, and the way we talked about ourselves sent the wrong signal to the world, making it harder for you to bring your broader community on Discord.” He presents some impressive figures as for the growth and traffic that Discord experienced, and offers up some generic examples of how it is used outside of the gaming community, including, “books, music, and art, creating servers to just be yourself and share moments with friends.”
Citron goes on to go into detail about some of the changes coming with the update including “fix[ing] hundreds of bugs, increased voice & video capacity by 200 percent, and continu[ing] to invest in reliability and performance as our top priority.” He also mentions new user onboard streamlining and server video to make it “easier than ever to get together.”
Longtime fans of Discord may or may not be excited to hear that this is “just the beginning of Discord’s journey,” which is summed up in this video.
