How Discord became an essential tool for gamers

Discord, a calling software with more than 250 million users as of 2020, is becoming an indispensable tool for gamers and others who require an Internet connection.

The main users of Discord are gamers. Gamers were using TeamSpeak and Skype until Discord appeared in 2015. However, the sound quality was not very good, so gamers who had no other choice had to use two tools.

In 2015, Discord appeared on the market with the slogan that it was time to abandon Skype and Teamspeak. Discord has better voice quality than Teamspeak and Skype, and has been widely accepted by many gamers who wanted to talk to real friends about anything other than games. In the years that followed, Discord gained more than 100 million monthly active users and millions of communities.

Discord founder Jason Citron was also one of the kids who once wanted to play games with friends. He graduated from college with breathtaking grades, overly immersed in online games like Warcraft and Everquest. He started coding games after graduating from college, started a game studio in 2008, and developed a social network application called OpenFeint.

Citron, which sold Open Paint in 2011, started a company called Hammer & Chisel in 2012. Here he released a game similar to League of Legends called Fates Forever. In this game, team play is a key genre called MOBA, so gamers could talk to each other through voice or text during game play. Realizing that the most outstanding feature of Fate & Forever is the chat function, Citron contemplated whether it would be possible to develop something new service with just the chat function.

He disbanded the game development team, fired one-third of the staff, and then moved to the new regime over six months to start developing Discord. According to Citron, Discord initially used only about 10 League of Warcraft and League of Warcraft players.

As a result of discussions with users from developers such as Citron, several defects were found in Discord, such as a call call failure or an unstable call quality. It also added the ability to assign roles to members or kick members, and this is widely accepted by users.

Citron insisted that the Discord service launch date was May 13, 2015, but it is said that this is the day when someone who does not know first started using Discord. Someone posted a Discord link in the Final Fantasy XiV section of the overseas bulletin board Reddit and introduced that there was a place to talk about the new expansion pack, and that day, developers, including Citron, gained hundreds of new users.

In Discord, there is a room called Server, and you can talk to other people who have entered the server. Discord users are attracted to the fact that unlike Skype, there is no step to make a call. Since many servers have been created, Citron and others have developed so that they can move servers more smoothly than users.

As the development progressed, Discord introduced status displays such as online status, screen sharing functions, and video calls. While other calling apps keep an eye on the development of new features in video conferencing, Discord says that the millisecond delay on servers with more than 1,000 participants is not an issue, but Discord is not. Say.

As Discord grows, the number of servers has soared and there are many servers with tens of thousands of members. In such a large-scale community, theft was not observed and there was a lot of confusion, but there were many actions taken, but malicious postings and bullying are frequent, and Discord is also taking this issue. As of 2020, 15% of Discord’s employees are working on this issue as they belong to the Trust & Safety division for the purpose of protecting users.

In addition, it started the Discord Store in 2018 to increase sales revenue from Discord games, but closed it after only a year. It can be said that this was the moment when I realized that what users asked Discord was a place to talk about the game, not a place to play the game. In addition, as of 2020, the main source of income for Discord was Discord Nitro, a subscription service, and in 2019, it did not suffer much in terms of financing, such as raising $400 million from investors.

Due to the corona 19 epidemic in 2020, Discord users increased by 47% in half a year, and research institutes and university professors began to use it. In June 2020, Discord announced that it will change its slogan to the place you speak of, and will improve model speed tools and add features in the future. Discord is no longer just for gamers, it can be said that group chats and video calls are building a space where no analogy can be found on the Internet. Related information can be found here.