Discord is the most used chat application today, taking more market share then Teamspeak, Mumble and Vent combined.
Discord is dominant in the world of gamers. It’s grown so big that even though its competitors might offer a better experience (check out Guilded for instance), Discord is likely to hit every rival out of the stadium like a souped up Smash character.
Investors certainly think there’s a lot to play for. Microsoft offered up $10bn to acquire Discord, but the chat app walked away from the deal. Sony then snuck in from behind and grabbed a minority stake in the company, ensuring they could get full integration with their Playstation consoles. Epic Games and Amazon were supposedly looking on too.
So how did something as simple as a chat app turn into a multi billion dollar game of capture the flag?
Discord brings together communities and makes it super-easy to flit between them.
Gamers haven’t ever really had one single place where they all gather. Not until Discord. Even then though, it wasn’t integrated with console voice chats. If you wanted to play a PS4 or Xbox game and talk to someone on a different platform, you had to have your phone by your side with Discord running in an app. Consoles were out of the loop.
So it’s a pretty big power play to see Sony invest in Discord. It tells you Sony knew they needed something better for their consoles than their standard voice chat. Microsoft must have been thinking along the same lines. Why build something to compete with Discord if there’s another option? Discord, for better or worse, is where the players are. Sony might even be able to retire their existing services as a result (Playstation Communities is already a goner).
If Microsoft had taken every slice of the Discord pie for themselves, it might not have been a good thing. Not for crossplay at any rate. Microsoft didn’t exactly make the most of Skype, which they bought back in 2011 for $8.5bn. It’s great that Microsoft snapped up Bethesda, but if they’d taken Discord too, Sony might not have been able to recoup - and Playstation gamers might have been locked out of the conversation permanently.
Chat has evolved over the years. It’s been a while since dial up was powering the conversation. But that’s about as long as Teamspeak has been gathering pools of gamers together. It’s still about - a few gamers still swear by it - but because you always needed to know, remember or store an IP address to access each chat room, it was a fairly closed off affair.
Then you’ve got Ventrilo, or Vent for short. Again, it’s VoIP setup meant it was more suited to private communities than the raging sit-at-the-bar experience that Discord can be.
All of the 'last-gen' chat apps, look like crap and are falling fast by the wayside with support being discontinued.
Then there’s Mumble. Despite having a name that suggests you can’t hear anyone properly, it actually has very good low latency audio streaming. If someone’s going to whisper ‘Would you kindly…?’ in your ear, you might as well hear your handler properly. But since Mumble is voice only and you have to pay for a server, it’s really only the diehards that have stuck around with it.
Then, of course, Discord came along. Their co-founder Jason Citron tells of how he was always chatting to friends on Vent growing up and was determined to create an alternative to the IP address deal. Well, he succeeded, working together with Mkoklaj Rozak to make a chat platform that was easy to use, offered decent codecs and sound quality, and was - Nitro features aside - primarily free.
One of my gaming groups was one an early adopter of Discord (Link to group). We joined during the beta and we never looked back, dropping our existing Teamspeak 3 server like a hot coal. But now everyone has a server. It’s not surprising in some ways, since it lets you do voice chat, video, document sharing - the whole kitchen sink. If it was an Elder Scrolls character, Discord would rack up some serious encumbrance points.
Last year Discord had 300m users, generated a 188% increase in revenue, and after all the hoo-ha with Sony and Microsoft, it seems to be unstoppable. Discord only falls down because it’s not available on consoles yet - and that’s looking to be a temporary situation.
Eventually you might be able to do everything on Discord. It’s already gone from a gamers chat platform to a chat platform with a lot of gamers on it. Platforms like Guilded might be able to do everything a bit better than Discord - and you can use all Guilded’s features for free - but they’re probably never going to get the mindshare that Discord has sucked up.
Of course, Discord will always have other new companies biting at it's heels, wanting a little piece of the pie. One of these is Guilded, a chat platform that borrows most of Discord's ideas, but adds to them with it's own take on 'community'. Some of the features that I believe that Guilded does better is threaded conversations, forums built within channels and the ability to create document stores. But, as we've seen ourselves. Change is uncomfortable to a lot of people and moving an entire community across to a fledgling service is nigh on impossible.
Can Guilded offer up any competition to the juggernaut that is Discord?
Gaming communities have always been a place to create lifelong friends. 20 years ago, myself and Bombjack went to a LAN event, met a few people and to this day they remain some of our best friends. We’ve since visited Japan with them, gone skiing and been a part of each other’s weddings.
Whether Discord keeps growing or not isn’t necessarily what matters. It’s probably best they don’t get a monopoly, but it’s also great to finally have somewhere that every gamer can gather.
The question that still hangs in the air is can Discord preserve their gaming roots? Can they continue to be a place where players can get to know one another, build lifelong friendships and feel a part of something? Until we know the answer, you’ll find me on Discord.
Be a part of our Discord community or find us on our fledgling Guilded server.
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