Discord's Future is The Games Tab... And Metal

[rgMekanic]

Discord has released a new update that will provide users with a tab to see friends that are playing games, have played games, and to launch games, as well as invite people to game. It's called the games tab. I think Discord explains it better in this video.

Metal.

 

[Deleted member 214115]

Now, if the dudettes and dudes at discord made a fucking game.......

 

[Chunder]

The new Steam beta with their Discord competitor is what has my buddies and I right now. Teamspeak quality without the shady business practices and less than reliable servers of Discord.

 

[Vercinaigh]

The new Steam beta with their Discord competitor is what has my buddies and I right now. Teamspeak quality without the shady business practices and less than reliable servers of Discord.

Eh? Steam goes down for me like 4 times a week. As for shady, yeah, lets just browse the "indie games" section with the post greenlight shit for awhile, shall we?

 

[Damar]

I'd just love to find a way to disable that stupid new games tab.

Sometimes less is more.... to me anyway.

 

[Tak Ne]

I had a feeling that Discord was following the ICQ/Skype model.

1. Make a new easy to use product
2. Get popular
3. Add bloat
4. Sell for a billion dollar price to a company who wants it for stupid reasons
5. Disappear into obscurity

 

[lostinseganet]

Now, if the dudettes and dudes at discord made a fucking game.......

Well valve pretty much doesn't either soo >_>

 

[NoOther]

Eh? Steam goes down for me like 4 times a week. As for shady, yeah, lets just browse the "indie games" section with the post greenlight shit for awhile, shall we?

That is strange, Discord works far better for me than Steam chat does.

 

[Vercinaigh]

That is strange, Discord works far better for me than Steam chat does.

That is...kinda what I was getting at?

 

[RanceJustice]

I've said before and I'll say it again - Be very leery of Discord. This is not to say I find it - in and of itself - bad application (well...maybe it automatically uses a few points to start for not being open source, but I digress).

Discord has come onto the scene and more or less replaced the entire ecosystem of gaming VOIP solutions (Mumble, Teamspeak, Ventrilo etc) and other messaging platforms - most of which were servers individually owned/controlled and/or hosted by a variety of professional hosts - with a single, monolithic, proprietary platform. That in and of itself is worrisome in this day and age when the Internet is becoming increasingly centralized around a few platforms. We've seen what has come from Facebook and Twitter becoming de-facto gateways to so much content exclusively within, or a a required link to their platforms . For instance, there as a time when signing up for a contest required only an email address. But that wasn't anywhere near as useful to the data mining and marketing parasites, so it is an anachronism if allowed at all, with Facebook likes and follows, Twitter follows and retweets etc... nearly the currency of the day for communication in some regards like this. What used to be a wide spread of content over many sites (not unlike this one) has become increasingly centralized with more and more web traffic going to fewer and fewer big sites (some of which are owned by some of the same conglomerates). I wish I could find the infographic I saw on this the other day which illustrated it rather well. Discord has the potential to move things in that direction even further, and we are already seeing how much gaming-related content is now in some using or linked to Discord.

That issue should be kept in mind but when added to the other half of the equation is where things get extremely concerning - funding. Check out Hammer And Chisel's / Discord's investors. Read up on their rise and expansion. There is a LOT of venture capital being invested into their platform and those investors do so knowing that for the moment, Discord is not making tons of profit. Discord is, by their devs own admission a few years ago in the "building up a user base, not so concerned with profitability right now" phase. However, that bill is going to come due and all those investors are going to expect a serious ROI ; history tells us this is almost never a good situation for the users! So how will Discord manage to monetize sufficient to meet all these obligations? As much as I HOPE it is based on ethical partnerships with elements of the gaming industry, supplemented by users with Discord Nitro subscription (and I personally subscribe to Nitro, its optional premium subscription in the hopes of bolstering that end of the business plan) it is at least possible (if not outright likely) that they will move to more unscrupulous methods. Its the typical Silicon Valley capitalism where the user is the product and all the data mining , analysis, marketing, and advertising congeals together into a large wave of exploitative garbage, flowing forth on its difficult perception for users especially those not looking for it specifically. While I grant that this may not be the complete motivation, I have to at least think it a reason that so many of the requested features for Discord that might be an impediment to this - ranging from options for end-to-end encrypted chats/voice/video to open sourcing connectivity/client/server elements for full features, to even things like federation and/or Matrix.org compliance - have basically let the devs mute on such requests.

Clearly these new features listed in the video with the Games tab are meant to trade blows with Steam, with each one taking a little from the other so to speak. However, when it comes to Discord it means even more Discord specific APIs for the industry to implement, meaning more and more Discord centrality. Great for Discord, maybe not for everyone else!

While Steam is not perfect, they are A) a privately held company without that sort of external investors directing them and B) have a very obvious, transparent business model - selling games! While I do think there are definitely places they can improve (such as their curation of non-working or shovelware ) , those aforementioned elements have already shown that Steam does business differently - from how they have been instrumental in pushing for things like Steam for Linux / SteamOS , something that a company with lots of investors would likely hate because it doesn't provide a ROI for the next quarter - despite the fact that Gabe Newell's prescience on Microsoft's attempt to launch their own locked down Store came true years down the road etc. Likewise, Steam does not need to do all kinds of surreptitious data mining - its use of heuristics are pretty both blatant (ie you go to your Discovery queue and pick what games you like and which you hate, or the tagging system showing you things based on past purchases) ostensibly benefit the user as well as Steam, and is not shared with 3rd parties in any way as it would undermine Steam's transparently apparent business model or selling you games you enjoy. So in some respects, Steam and Discord are very different, including in business model.

So why did I write this big book? In essence to say that despite Discord''s benefits, it is important to watch what is happening all around them and pay attention to the money. This is an industry that has made the "boiled frog" model standard, after all! Lets just be wary of any company with Discord's business plan but even more than ever be concerned about one that has turned users of many distributed, user-focused and/or owned services, to a single centralized proprietary platform.

P.S. Some may say Discord got where they did because of very real benefits in their software and I don't deny it, to a point. However, I think we should look for what they did right (ie user friendly invites and "rooms" system) and see that applied to other services. For instance, the Matrix.org network and its most famous client Riot.im is very "Discord like" in regards to some UI and features, but is also part of an open, federated system like XMPP and is fully open source. Likewise, we can continue to make it clear to Discord that openness is an important and desirable feature among the userbase in hopes of positive change.

 

[NoOther]

That is...kinda what I was getting at?

Yeah that was my bad, it was supposed to include Chunder's post. I was agreeing with you.

 

[Vercinaigh]

Yeah that was my bad, it was supposed to include Chunder's post. I was agreeing with you.

No problem.

 

[Hitti2]

I had a feeling that Discord was following the ICQ/Skype model.

1. Make a new easy to use product
2. Get popular
3. Add bloat
4. Sell for a billion dollar price to a company who wants it for stupid reasons
5. Disappear into obscurity

Yahoo's All-Seeing-Eye>xfire>game tracker> soon to be discord and or http://www.hlsw.org/hlsw/download/ .

I was very pissed when xfire closed down then I got really fucking angry at game tracker lite closed down its service. I'm gonna try hlsw when I get a chance.

 

[rudy]

The new Steam beta with their Discord competitor is what has my buddies and I right now. Teamspeak quality without the shady business practices and less than reliable servers of Discord.

We will see what they can do but the whole reason most people switched to discord is cause valve really screwed up with steams voice call. I mean really it was so broken for me. You couldn't add more people to the voice call. They also had no integration with their own games like CSGO which is weird.

 

[rudy]

I've said before and I'll say it again - Be very leery of Discord. This is not to say I find it - in and of itself - bad application (well...maybe it automatically uses a few points to start for not being open source, but I digress).

Discord has come onto the scene and more or less replaced the entire ecosystem of gaming VOIP solutions (Mumble, Teamspeak, Ventrilo etc) and other messaging platforms - most of which were servers individually owned/controlled and/or hosted by a variety of professional hosts - with a single, monolithic, proprietary platform. That in and of itself is worrisome in this day and age when the Internet is becoming increasingly centralized around a few platforms. We've seen what has come from Facebook and Twitter becoming de-facto gateways to so much content exclusively within, or a a required link to their platforms . For instance, there as a time when signing up for a contest required only an email address. But that wasn't anywhere near as useful to the data mining and marketing parasites, so it is an anachronism if allowed at all, with Facebook likes and follows, Twitter follows and retweets etc... nearly the currency of the day for communication in some regards like this. What used to be a wide spread of content over many sites (not unlike this one) has become increasingly centralized with more and more web traffic going to fewer and fewer big sites (some of which are owned by some of the same conglomerates). I wish I could find the infographic I saw on this the other day which illustrated it rather well. Discord has the potential to move things in that direction even further, and we are already seeing how much gaming-related content is now in some using or linked to Discord.

That issue should be kept in mind but when added to the other half of the equation is where things get extremely concerning - funding. Check out Hammer And Chisel's / Discord's investors. Read up on their rise and expansion. There is a LOT of venture capital being invested into their platform and those investors do so knowing that for the moment, Discord is not making tons of profit. Discord is, by their devs own admission a few years ago in the "building up a user base, not so concerned with profitability right now" phase. However, that bill is going to come due and all those investors are going to expect a serious ROI ; history tells us this is almost never a good situation for the users! So how will Discord manage to monetize sufficient to meet all these obligations? As much as I HOPE it is based on ethical partnerships with elements of the gaming industry, supplemented by users with Discord Nitro subscription (and I personally subscribe to Nitro, its optional premium subscription in the hopes of bolstering that end of the business plan) it is at least possible (if not outright likely) that they will move to more unscrupulous methods. Its the typical Silicon Valley capitalism where the user is the product and all the data mining , analysis, marketing, and advertising congeals together into a large wave of exploitative garbage, flowing forth on its difficult perception for users especially those not looking for it specifically. While I grant that this may not be the complete motivation, I have to at least think it a reason that so many of the requested features for Discord that might be an impediment to this - ranging from options for end-to-end encrypted chats/voice/video to open sourcing connectivity/client/server elements for full features, to even things like federation and/or Matrix.org compliance - have basically let the devs mute on such requests.

Clearly these new features listed in the video with the Games tab are meant to trade blows with Steam, with each one taking a little from the other so to speak. However, when it comes to Discord it means even more Discord specific APIs for the industry to implement, meaning more and more Discord centrality. Great for Discord, maybe not for everyone else!

While Steam is not perfect, they are A) a privately held company without that sort of external investors directing them and B) have a very obvious, transparent business model - selling games! While I do think there are definitely places they can improve (such as their curation of non-working or shovelware ) , those aforementioned elements have already shown that Steam does business differently - from how they have been instrumental in pushing for things like Steam for Linux / SteamOS , something that a company with lots of investors would likely hate because it doesn't provide a ROI for the next quarter - despite the fact that Gabe Newell's prescience on Microsoft's attempt to launch their own locked down Store came true years down the road etc. Likewise, Steam does not need to do all kinds of surreptitious data mining - its use of heuristics are pretty both blatant (ie you go to your Discovery queue and pick what games you like and which you hate, or the tagging system showing you things based on past purchases) ostensibly benefit the user as well as Steam, and is not shared with 3rd parties in any way as it would undermine Steam's transparently apparent business model or selling you games you enjoy. So in some respects, Steam and Discord are very different, including in business model.

So why did I write this big book? In essence to say that despite Discord''s benefits, it is important to watch what is happening all around them and pay attention to the money. This is an industry that has made the "boiled frog" model standard, after all! Lets just be wary of any company with Discord's business plan but even more than ever be concerned about one that has turned users of many distributed, user-focused and/or owned services, to a single centralized proprietary platform.

P.S. Some may say Discord got where they did because of very real benefits in their software and I don't deny it, to a point. However, I think we should look for what they did right (ie user friendly invites and "rooms" system) and see that applied to other services. For instance, the Matrix.org network and its most famous client Riot.im is very "Discord like" in regards to some UI and features, but is also part of an open, federated system like XMPP and is fully open source. Likewise, we can continue to make it clear to Discord that openness is an important and desirable feature among the userbase in hopes of positive change.

You say a lot and pretty much all of it is warranted but the thing I have noticed about gamers is they just don't care, the one good thing about gamers is that they are fairly flexible in voice chat lines. They have moved through so many programs I can barely keep track of them. When Discord tries to put the clamp down and make their money chances are gamers will simply jump ship to whatever the flavor of the month chat is and in the mean time it will take discord a lot of work and market share to get to any sort of place where they have a hold on the customer. IMO they are going to have to win some major integrations with some major games if they ever want to be a forced must have application like steam, battle.net or origin are.

 

[NoOther]

We will see what they can do but the whole reason most people switched to discord is cause valve really screwed up with steams voice call. I mean really it was so broken for me. You couldn't add more people to the voice call. They also had no integration with their own games like CSGO which is weird.

This is also one of the things I like so much about Discord over Slack. Slack you can only make a call to one other person. Discord you can have everyone on the voice channel.