Shifting Priorities: How Discord Is Refocusing Its Strategy

Discord is one of the most popular messaging apps around, with a focus on community-run “servers” and IRC-like chatrooms. Now, the company says it is changing its focus.

Discord announced today that it plans to focus less on being a general-purpose communication platform, and more on being a useful platform for games and shared interests. There are no changes happening right now, but over time, there will probably be more gaming-focused features and updates to Discord.

The company’s blog post explained, “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 recognized 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. We believe Discord can play a uniquely important role in the future of gaming.”

Discord started as a chat application specifically for people playing games, like TeamSpeak, and it was even a store for PC games for a while. Over the past few years, though, the company has tried to pitch Discord as a more general-purpose messaging platform, in a similar category as Telegram or Facebook Messenger. For whatever reason, the company is now backtracking from those wider ambitions.

Even though it might not be the priority for the company anymore, Discord is still popular outside of gaming, and it’s one of the best free tools for group communications. It’s a great option for smaller group chats , and it remains popular with software development and AI communities. For example, when the AI image generator Midjourney first launched, you could only generate images by typing messages in the group’s Discord server—the web interface didn’t show up for months.

For now, the company is mostly focusing on performance and usability improvements. The blog post said, “Ensuring you can talk and hang out reliably – especially while you’re playing – means we’ll continue prioritizing the power of our voice, video, and streaming technology. This includes expanding more of Discord’s capabilities to more devices for cross-platform experiences.”

Source: Discord

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