When Discord announced earlier this year that it’s returning to its roots and doubling down on gaming, its users cheered—and it’s easy to see why.
Although you can use Discord to build any kind of community, a huge percentage of its 200 million monthly active users are people who love to play games. They use Discord to party up, chat, and play games with their friends. Its cross-platform functionality, status as a hub for game communities, and reliable voice and video-sharing make it the ultimate way to play games with friends online.
So it makes sense that, alongside its other gaming initiatives, the team at Discord has been quietly building out an ambitious new program to enable game developers to launch games and consumer apps directly on the platform.
Given Discord’s massive and very targeted active base of gamers and the fact that the platform is built atop intrinsically social servers, the potential for Discord Activities is enormous—it could become one of the biggest game platforms available, if developers see its potential and adopt it.
In 2007, Facebook launched its application platform, allowing developers to launch experiences to its more than 50M MAU. Facebook had grown to 200M MAU by 2009, which is the size of the userbase that Discord has today. Farmville launched Facebook in June 2009, and the game quickly grew to over 30M DAU and helped Zynga become a modern day games powerhouse.
Here’s why developers should take notice.
The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Web Games
The web-based games landscape has undergone numerous transformations over the decades. In the early 2000s, web game platforms like Yahoo Games, Neopets, Runescape, and Miniclip captivated millions. These platforms became social hubs where players gathered, competed, and forged online communities. However, a perfect storm with the discontinuation of Adobe Flash, the advent of mobile gaming and, and eventually high-quality games becoming readily available on mobile caused a significant decline in web-based gaming.
Meanwhile, in the East, mobile gaming boomed, giving rise to super app distribution platforms like WeChat, Line, and Kakao. These platforms not only dominated their respective markets but also created thriving game distribution ecosystems. Western social platforms attempted to replicate this success with HTML5 games platforms — Facebook with FB Instant Games, Snapchat with Snapchat Games, and even TikTok. Unfortunately, none of these initiatives matched the success of their Asian counterparts, often leading to their eventual decline or deprioritization.
However, it’s not all bad news for web games. In recent years, indie publishing platform itch.io—which hosts over 400,000 browser-based games—has shown there’s still an audience for web games. After the mega-hit web game Wordle took the world by storm in 2021 and 2022, the New York Times acquired it and began touting the success of its expanding games empire.
There’s proven demand for web games, if only a serious, gaming-focused company can solve the distribution challenge and connect devs with the right audience. Enter Discord, poised to revolutionize the web games ecosystem by leveraging its unique position as a social platform.
Discord is Building the Next Games Platform Centered on Social
What is Discord?
Discord is a communication platform originally designed for gamers, allowing them to connect via text, voice, and video. With over 200 million monthly active users, Discord has evolved into a cross-platform powerhouse used by diverse communities beyond gaming, including educators, hobbyists, and professionals. Users join Discord servers, which are chat/audio/video-based spaces organized around specific interests or social structures.
What are Activities?
Discord Activities is a new application platform designed to bring web-based experiences directly into Discord servers. This feature enables users to play games without leaving the app, fostering a seamless blend of gaming and social interaction.
Why this is a Big Opportunity
Lessons from the Past and Future Prospects
The journey of social gaming platforms is marked by notable successes and failures. Facebook and Roblox have demonstrated the potential of combining social elements with gaming. Facebook’s integration of games within its platform created a massive user base, while Roblox built an entire universe where users could create, share, and play games together.
From the successes of Facebook and Roblox, we learn the importance of integrating social elements deeply within the gaming experience. Building games that encourage interaction and community can drive long-term engagement. Additionally, platforms linked to existing social networks need to stay committed to using social channels and user relationships to build audiences for games. A platform is only as strong as its ability to create successful developers.
On the flip side, Facebook Games’ eventual decline, and newer platforms like Snap Games, TikTok’s minigame platform, and Facebook Instant Games (FBIG) struggled to gain traction. In each of these cases, engagement in the games platforms conflicted with engagement in the respective apps’ core social media businesses. In the case of Snap and TikTok, consumer applications were never part of the platforms’ strategy. And while Facebook’s early platform strategy featured consumer apps (and supported them with big, important growth channels like FB Feed and App Requests), this strategy changed over time to focus engagement on Facebook’s core/internal social features. In each case, channels that would have otherwise helped support games businesses were either removed or throttled, limiting their effectiveness as growth engines. These platforms failed to create a compelling ecosystem or leverage their social components effectively, leading to their decline.
Other new platforms, such as YouTube Instant and LinkedIn Games, lack the same integrated social features and dedicated games-centric user base that Discord possesses. This gives Discord a distinct edge.
How Discord Activities will Succeed:
Discord’s platform team has taken some of these lessons to heart as it’s built out Activities:
- Integrated Social Features: Unlike previous attempts that were precious about their social primitives in order to protect an existing non-games business, Discord’s foundation is built for developers to fully utilize existing social channels. Games Activities on Discord can leverage chat, voice, and video features to create more immersive and engaging experiences.
- Existing Gaming Audience: Discord’s primary user base consists of players aged teens to twenties, making it a fertile ground for a gaming ecosystem. Additionally, these players are organized in small interests-based servers. Discord’s userbase exhibits the high engagement of passionate interest groups but aggregated into a large overall audience, an effect Discord calls “niche at scale”.
- Developer-Friendly Environment: Many game developers already use Discord, making them familiar with its tools and culture. This pre-existing relationship simplifies the transition to developing for Discord Activities.
- Community Building: Discord allows developers to build and engage their communities live with the game. This real-time interaction fosters a strong connection between developers and players which can lead to increased engagement, retention, and monetization.
Looking to the Future
What Should Builders Be Doing?
To thrive in the Discord Activities ecosystem, builders should focus on:
Designing for Channels and Social Interaction: Games should be built with Discord’s social engagement patterns and channels in mind.
As an example, Captain.tv builds games for communities to play together on sites like Twitch and YouTube. Their latest title, Arena Kingdoms, is focused entirely on Discord. Arena Kingdoms is a community auto-battler game where your guild in the game is your Discord server, instantly allowing players to be a part of something through their gameplay. Players can play by themselves, but importantly the game is designed to be played socially via server vs. server tournaments where players must work together to help their server win.
Building Early and Experimenting: Early adoption allows developers to experiment and adapt to the platform’s nuances, gaining a competitive edge. Playroom pivoted from building a party game backend into building games like Death By AI for Discord Activities early and has seen significant traction, peaking at 700K DAU after launching on the platform.
Similarly, Mojiworks pivoted from building games for other social platforms like Snapchat. Originally built for other platforms, the company launched Chef Showdown on Discord Activities. The game has been played by more than 14 million people since, with players spending more than 3X the amount of time in-game than on other platforms.
On social platforms, this kind of lead compounds because communities form around their favorite games. This community activity leads to increased word of mouth growth and retention. The more people play, the more their friends and channel-mates see the game. These social game network effects can power a strong, long-lasting growth engine.
Work With Discord: The Discord team is actively working with developers to improve Activities as a new platform. After all, developer success is a core measure of such a platform. That means early developers have an opportunity to not just build great games, but also to give feedback to the Discord team on how to maximize the chance that builders can be successful.
Developers can get support and give feedback through Discord’s community channels, like the Discord Developer Server and Discord Developer Support.
Live Ops Discipline: Continuously updating and improving the game based on user feedback and engagement metrics is crucial for sustained success. Discord can help aid growth, it is a developer’s responsibility to take control of retention and monetization. As an example, FRVR’s Discord game Krunker Strike has continued to grow post-launch, and the team has already gotten strong signal from players that they have an appetite to support the game in live ops through in-app purchases.
Mitigating Platform Risk
As the platform matures, developers can expect deeper and more complex content. Younger audiences are ready for more sophisticated experiences. To mitigate platform risk, developers should:
- Leverage Discord’s Primitives: Utilize chat, voice, and video features to create unique gaming experiences.
- Focus on Community Building: Engage with the community and foster strong connections with players.
- Innovate and Adapt: Stay ahead by continuously innovating and adapting to changing user preferences and platform updates.
Embracing the Opportunity
Discord Activities represents a significant opportunity for developers to create the next generation of web-based games. With its robust social features, large user base, and developer-friendly environment, Discord is well-positioned to become the next super app for gaming.
The time is ripe for builders to embrace this platform, experiment with new ideas, and contribute to a vibrant ecosystem that combines the best of social interaction and gaming. As the platform grows, those who seize the opportunity early will be best positioned to lead and shape the future of gaming on Discord, and the return of Social Gaming If you’re building something exciting, reach out to us and consider applying to SPEEDRUN, our program for early stage companies building at the intersection of technology and games!
