Communication app Discord has become an important cog in the gaming space, allowing companies and their communities to communicate with one another and essentially bringing game developers closer to the audiences base. Discord is ready to start moving away from its gaming focus, and has announced an effort to become more of a tool for “day-to-day communication,” As detailed by Discord CEO Jason Citron and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy:
Games are what brought many of you on the platform, and we’ll always be grateful for that. As time passed, 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. You wanted a place to have genuine conversations and spend quality time with people, whether catching up, learning something, or sharing ideas
With this new focus, the company has redesigned its website with the tagline of “Your place to talk.” The new site describes Discord as appropriate for school clubs, gaming groups, art communities and groups of friends. The company is also increasing its capacity for voice and video communication along with making UI changes and performance improvements to be less specific to gaming. The company has also created a “Discord Safety Centre” that summarises its data practices, rules, safety tips and explanations for parents and teachers.
This move sees Discord compete more directly with the likes of Slack and Teams for group communication, a lucrative commercial space in this isolated day and age. While Discord claims a user base of around 100 million who collectively spend 4 billion minutes in conversation every day, it can only grow so much if it focuses on gaming and so this move into other markets makes a lot of commercial sense for them. It will be interesting to see if they can keep their core gamer market engaged while also rolling out features that expands their reach.
Last Updated: July 2, 2020
JWT-80
July 2, 2020 at 09:24
If they can just fix the streaming audio issues 🙁