Discord wants to unify the cross-play world

And its metrics are proving that to be a good move

Community is a must for any game on the mid- to -hardcore side, and Discord has been the de facto platform driving that for a while. What's interesting is that Discord's strength, in large part, comes from being a platform and community agnostic tool: it's not only for console, not only for PC, not only for official game channels, not only for private friend groups.

[ht to Dean’s article and interview here which inspired this post.]

Instead, it unifies all of these cohorts and their respective needs, especially as cross-play (i.e. players on PC and console being able to play together in the same server) has become an expected standard for major multiplayer games. Discord solves the fragmentation that's inherent in the siloed game platforms, and crucially even down to a must-have feature for friends who want to play together: voice chat. While a lot of games (Fortnite, Apex, others) have enabled their own in-game cross-platform voice chat, it’s often wonky at best, and also doesn’t enable the kind of game-agnostic community that players also love to engage in, namely talking with your group of friends even when you’re not playing the same game.

This strategy is a great one. Discord has 200M users playing 1.5B hours of games per month, which is 7.5 hours of gameplay per user. Discord knows that that is not likely all in one game, or even on one platform, and Discord’s goal is to bring everything together. In this way, Discord rises about the fracas of shifting game affinities, new releases, device swaps, and more. It’s not beholden to the limitations that games or platforms put around themselves. Beyond that, once players find their community and friends, Discord is the landscape for those conversations and engagement whether they’re playing a game or not. The platform goes beyond being a destination for chatter about a game, and instead an ever-present coffee klatch for organic groups and communities.

But there is a new entrant trying to take on Discord’s dominance: Telegram is increasing eyed by game devs desperate to leverage its existing audience for user acquisition. Telegram has none of the game-centric features or cross-play voice chat that Discord has, but user-starved game developers (especially those in web3 who can’t access traditional distribution through game platform stores), are feeling that Telegram can offer them routes to users.

And more than that, developers see Telegram as an actual channel for distributing a game, not just rallying communities around a game. This is more Facebook-style social gaming than the entrenched community/friends/voice chat world of Discord. That said, TG’s move into being a game platform should be something Discord closely watches, not because TG will soon host Call of Duty, but because the platform could become a key destination for UA and companion apps/”games” in a way that might cannibalize Discord’s gaming dominance.

Overall, I don’t see these two platforms swimming in the same direction, and Discord’s existing entrenchment in gaming culture and its focus on game features put it well ahead of the (somehow) even uglier and harder to use TG platform.