Discord's Gamer Gamble
Discord recently announced their 'Quests' feature, what's the future for Discord's redoubled focus on gamers?
In May 2024, Jason Citron released a Blog Post about Discord's 'Next Chapter'. This post talks about the direction of the company, and a return to it's 2015 roots as a chat app for gamers. Back in the tail of the pandemic, Discord asked us all to 'Imagine a place', declaring the app as a home for everyone.
What led to Discord walking back the pandemic marketing moments? What direction is Discord heading now? In this article we'll dive into the brand identity, marketing and revenue streams Discord has innovated & dropped in pursuit of their upcycled capital G GAMER branding.
From humble beginnings
Back in 2016, Discord's identity was solidly in the gaming sphere, celebrating their milestone of 11,000,000 registered accounts with the title: "11 Million Players In One Year". At the time, /r/Overwatch was the largest community on the platform, with the earliest implementation of the (now shuttered) Discord Partner Program focusing on large subreddits and gaming content creators. The (also shuttered) HypeSquad events program also focused on representative based marketing at gaming conventions.
In a very early Q&A from May 2015, Jason even gave this direct response, enshrining Discord as the nexus for gaming:
Q (uppfinarn): Can you tell us a little about your roadmap?
A (Jason): What we’ve been working on is getting discord to a place where it is good enough to use and play games with friends. And it’s cool to see you guys using it.
[...]
After that, we’re working towards getting the word out. Heavensward comes out soon and we’re starting to reach out to the whole Final Fantasy community to get more people in and kinda get Discord to the next level.
Of the early feature additions we saw in Discord, many were directly tied to gaming, including Rich Presence for games, the Game Overlay and the Streamkit for OBS & Xsplit. In all regards, the direction of the platform was clear. It was a home for gamers, and everything from the dark-theme UI to the quirky brand identity solidifed this.
It's the end of the world as we know it
The Covid-19 pandemic thrust the world into a devastatingly different landscape, decimating many industries while vastly inflating others. People that, previously, carried out the majority of their social interactions in person were now forced to use social media to keep up with their friends.
At the peak of this cultural shift in 2020, Discord announced the hiring of a new Chief Marketing Officer, Tesa Aragones. Touting a prestigious history as the CMO of VSCO & several senior positions at Nike, she came in strong aiming to position Discord as the place to be for communities and individuals during the pandemic:
But 2020 has helped me understand the even greater potential in digital communities to find purpose and belonging. That is why it was so inspiring and refreshing to meet you and learn that Discord exists to give everyone the power to create belonging in their life. The feeling of “belonging” is a universal human need. And now more than ever, people are looking for ways to stay connected. I believe that there is so much opportunity for Discord as a brand because the service serves this very specific need for all kinds of communities.
During this time, Discord pivoted to meet their new audience. Discord was now 'Your place to talk'. Content creators were all the rage and attention was back on them, from both viewers and companies hoping to turn their fanbase into MAU, which saw Discord re-open their Partner Program with an entirely revamped requirement system, and even opened the platform up to educational institutions with the Student Hub feature, creating a unique type of server for students.
The userbase goes Endemic
As the pandemic receeded from the cultural eye, limitations were lifted and the 'New normal' just became normal, the inflated userbase that flooded all social platforms over 2020 trickled back out. The ill-fated 'Imagine a Place' marketing campaign faded from memory, and the pivotal 'Discord the movie' was scrubbed from YouTube.
The reason for this removal was never explicitly clarified - but it's speculated that licencing Danny DeVito's likeness for an old marketing campaign was simply not worth the cost. This marketing moment was announced in July 2021, and Tesa Aragones departed the company shortly after in November 2021, leaving the CMO position vacant. Later in January 2024, 17% of Discord's workforce was also laid off, including swaths of the marketing team.
The pandemic was over, and so was Discord's identity as your place to talk. Discord was no longer asking us to 'Imagine a Place', they were focusing their efforts on strategic partnerships with Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass & individual studios like Capcom.
In the tail end of 2022, Discord made a further return to roots, focusing back onto their Partner Program and the content creators bringing users to their platform. This period of time saw the launch of the Server Subscriptions feature, which I've already written about. So what's next for Discord to step back into the comfortable shoes of gaming?
The Quest to IPO
As Discord announced their next chapter in May 2024, the pandemic moment was over, and Discord decided resolutely to narrow their scope back onto the core userbase that kickstarted their platform all those years ago. GAMERS. As quoted from Jason Citron:
After taking stock of the world now that the pandemic is largely behind us, and learning directly from you about how Discord can be even more useful, we’ve recognised the need to narrow our focus from broadly being a community-centric chat app to being a place that helps people deepen their friendships around games and shared interests.
And with this moment, we saw gaming companies more deeply integrated with Discord than they ever have been, with Epic Games blazing a trail with the first Discord marketing usage of the term 'Quest'.
Now, Valorant is plastered on your profile & your friends are walking marketing for the games they play - literally - Discord acknoledges their Quests system as advertisting. This is Discord's gamer gamble, an ambitious new monetization strategy aimed at strategic partners in the gaming industry to incentivise Discord users to play their games for all kinds of rewards, from in-game items to Discord Profile features like Avatar Decorations.
Discord seems poised to focus deeply on this new avenue, seeing a perfect slot in the venn diagram of monetization & integrity, carfully vetting strategic partners to ensure high quality rewards for their users and ensuring no inappropriate content is advertised to users on the platform.
We've previously seen similar strategic partnerships in Discord's app directory with a plethora of companies featured on the homepage, which I've previously covered. This new system seems in line with Discord's precious efforts in this area and comparable to the existing collaborations for Discord Nitro Perks like Xbox Game Pass vouchers, even populating the same area in your user settings that those promotional items would appear.
This acknowledgement of advertising is a very lateral step from Discord, which has marketed to users in various ways over the years (more about that here) but always shyed away from directly calling it advertising. With Discord seeking legal counsel for their Quests product, creating new dedicated Advertisement Policies that include Activities, as well as aggressively hiring for many positions.
Your Server is now a Guild
Discord's committment to this gamer audience isn't just limited to marketing, in May 2024, Discord started experimenting with a new unique Server type. Contrasting the unique Server type added during the pandemic - Student Hubs - this unique feature lets you turn your Server into a gaming Guild.
Seemingly initially targeting those who've played Valorant (as detected by the Game Rich Presence system Jason & Stan talked about way back in 2015), this feature is aimed at those small friend groups that make up the majority of Discord's MAU.
Across the product, Discord wants to show you what games your friends are playing & focus on the small friend groups that really power the product.
The great compromise
In April 2021, NPR interviewed Jason Citron about the direction of the platform amid rumours of an acquisition by Microsoft. In that interview, the following question was answered by him:
Many users point to Discord being ad-free as part of its appeal. It's like the anti-Facebook business model. Why's this so important to Discord?
We believe that people's data is their data and that people should feel comfortable and safe to have conversations and that their data is not going to be used against them in any way that is is improper.
We take privacy very seriously. We do not scan peoples' messages. We do not read them. However, Discord does not have end-to-end encryption. So if you break our community guidelines, we will go investigate. And if we do find that you are doing that, we will ban you, so that we take privacy very seriously. But we also have a trade-off where we also take safety very seriously.
Discord's ardent ad-free stance is broken. We are now seeing advertisements directly in-app and it's upset many users. As for message scanning? When Jason Citron spoke before the US Senate, it co-incided with an article covering Discord's scanning of user messages which invalidates the other half of this statement, we've since even seen AI powered user profiling.
But with an opt-out system avaliable, is it really comparable to the state of apps like Twitter which have incredibly aggressive & targeted advertisements?
