How does Discord make money? Their new update to the platform is giving us clues on how they will.
Discord is the answer I wish I had when I was in high school. My friends and I would use Skype for hours and hours on end but we always had issues with it. Always having a “group leader” invite others to calls when wanting to add additional people, bad group chat functionalities and just the fact that it was a fairly bloated software (although that is also the case with Discord).
All that was solved with Discord. Best of all, it was free. Meaning gamers can chat, voice message and have accounts without having to pay a single dollar.
Interesting. You aren’t hosting Discord on your own server’s so what’s the catch? Discord is not cheap to run. Some minor expenses may be:
- Handling over 5,000,000 users at the same time. (Which was posted last year).
- Storing Billions of Messages
- A 40 person staff of developers, designers, and executives.
- A robot hamster. (At least $20,000,000 market value)
Now, to a lot of people this isn’t really much of a surprise. A lot of extremely successful companies have done this in the past including Facebook. Get a central place where people want to be then profit later. Discord has raised over $50 Million from huge Venture Capitalists as well as having a Discord Nitro, a $5/month service for additional features.
All of this being said, with so much money raised, how can they turn out a profit? After this update, I have a good feeling what they are trying to do.
Keep the gamers on their platform.
I don’t mean to sound obvious, but this really is a difficult task considering how the gaming industry has been very split up over multiple platforms. Let’s have a look at the new update.
The new “Games” dashboard brings in a view where you can view news from upcoming games as well as the games your friends are playing. This is incredible news since this would be something you would have to go on Reddit to find out. This would also be a good spot to have a promoted game, another revenue option for Discord.
Although most of these links go to the official dev blogs on Steam or other client services, it could make a really good news aggregator such as IGN, PC Gamer or other news outlets. That’s not the most impressive part though.
Discord is taking on Steam and other Launcher Clients.
The gaming ecosystem is a little flawed. AAA game developers are not letting Steam hold a monopoly in the PC gaming market so they are creating their own. Epic Games, Blizzard and Valve own all of the popular options that are holding gamer’s hostage. Add your friend on Steam, Battle.net and Epic Games. It’s annoying and isn’t a real representation of your friends list.
Discord makes this easy with the integrations from older client’s to theirs. With the addition of the game launcher, it now keeps user’s off of the Epic Games, Blizzard or Steam client’s and lets them do the communication on their own. The addition of the Rich Presence has also made this a spectacular move on their behalf.
Final Notes
Discord’s plan from the beginning (and even now) was to appeal to gamers and give them what they wanted.
It first started with Skype and TeamSpeak. Gamers weren’t happy with the way they communicated so they built a product knowing that gamers would hop on it as soon as they could.
Now, gamers aren’t happy with the whole gaming ecosystem being separated. Everyone is already on discord, so let’s keep them on Discord and let us handle how people join games.
The vision is always a little blurry for Discord. However, we have seen that they are growing at a rapid rate and with the entire gaming community backing them.
Soon, it seems like integrating your platform with Discord is a must, otherwise your game might not be played as much as it should be. Making Discord not only powerful, but almost unstoppable.
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