Your place to talk. That's the new slogan for the popular digital social-space platform Discord, announced Tuesday, June 30th.
If you're unfamiliar with the platform, Discord is a free, digital chatting and networking service, built on the backs of video game players getting together and chatting via text or VoIP while playing video games. The platform was originally marketed to people who play video games, usually those of which needing chat rooms to play together via multiplayer. While services like Mumble and Teamspeak have been prominent in the market for much more time, Discord was able to carve it's own mark into the market by offering simple and effective security tools, quality voice chat, and text communication, and all with low impact on connection to game servers. It's also pretty, which may sound like a moot point, but is important to many gamers who will pay premium prices to have aesthetic gear for their gaming.
Coming onto the scene in 2015, Jason Citron, CEO and Founder of Discord, created the platform specifically for gamers to reconnect and play games. The software was functional, clean, and easy to use. Ever since, Discord has been growing quickly. The platform has over 250 million users with about 56 million monthly users. That's more than Slack, a team networking software with similar chatroom functionality for professional communication. In fact, some teams started using discord due to it's customization "servers", the groups people set up to connect, and it's easily understood design.
Outside of professional teams, other groups started getting together on Discord. Study groups, Dungeons & Dragons groups, Book Clubs, and even general hangout places for friends, people have been flocking to the platform. Creators have programmed bots that can be added for free to servers in order to serve functions of administration and event organization, to rolling dice and hosting their own text based RPGs. The flexibility of the platform began to grow, and Discord started to evolve as well. Banking off it's steadily increasing popularity, Discord has tried a few initiatives over the few years of its life. For a short time in 2018 and 2019, you could purchase video games direction through Discord and launch them through the platform. You could also purchase a membership called Discord Nitro, which gave you more access to your favorite custom emojiis and upgraded your favorite servers with better sound and options. The video game purchasing flopped and eventually was removed altogether, but Nitro has stayed as a way for the most dedicated users to operate. Soon, companies, professional gaming groups, streamers, and other groups started flocking to Discord to host their fans, customers, and club members.
While growth for Discord was moving in a direction beyond gamers already, the arrival of Covid-19 lockdowns in the early part of 2020 pushed the platform even further. With the addition of video calls and chatting, Many joined up with the platform as a preferred alternative to video calls and meetings adjacent to Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Discord saw a huge increase in registered and active users as many people needed places to socialize and work with their contacts. My own personal D&D server is host to friends who play video games, but also an area for two different D&D groups, and a general chat for comfort and advice during lockdown. With these dynamic changes, Jason announced the formal decision Tuesday on Twitter.
When we began building Discord in 2015 we had a hunch that one day people might use Discord to talk and hang out beyond just playing games together. Turns out, that’s what you all thought too. Today we’re making it official! -@jasoncitron
Your Place to Talk. Already the platform has become each group's place to share and communicate. This minor change shows an attentiveness for Discord to see it's users and have the agility to change itself over time to keep meeting the needs of it's users. While Discord has many more users besides gamers, and users that are on discord for reason other than games, it is still a reliable and fantastic service that caters to the needs of friends playing their best video games. It just so happens that Discord is now also that favorite place for many other interests as well.
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