Discord: New Platform Opportunities for Game Studios | BITKRAFT Summit 2024

hey everybody I'm excited to see everybody here uh especially because it's the three best days of the of weather in San Francisco and you're spending it in this uh this dungeon down here but I appreciate it um and Scott and the bigcraft team have impeccable timing to bring you all to San Francisco in this perfect week and they've done an amazing job uh just coordinating this event my name is Tim I lead corporate development I get to cover strategy I think about m& uh specifically uh any Founders out there or people looking to sell their companies please reach out to me and most importantly I get to play Talk and think about games I basically have the job that I dreamed about as a kid when I

was playing countless hours of Counterstrike Starcraft shout out to the frost giant team and talking to my friends on ventrillo and it's a full circle experience you know the origin of Discord is actually disrupting the Legacy voice server uh voice servers and building a 10x better product but Discord is much more than just a voice and communication platform it's a multidimens ditional network of 200 million monthly active users and 19 million active communities it's where your friends are it's where emerging trends like Ai and web 3 are being formed and it's also where gaming happens and it's also where gaming happens 90% of our monthly active users are playing games they're spending collectively 1.5 billion hours playing

thousands of hit titles and it's not just where gaming happens it's where games are being discovered and where games are being built but we recognize that we can't build everything ourselves my first acquisition at Discord 3 years ago was ubiquity 6 which seated our platform strategy and we rely on game Publishers developers Partners to build amazing experiences activities and games on and adjacent to our Network and we're just getting started we have we're con we're continuously investing in the infrastructure to make sure that those developers partners and Studios can become successful on our platform and given the immense opportunity I want to invite a couple additional folks onto the stage just to talk about the new platform opportunities on Discord can you please welcome Laura from Discord tall from Infinite Canvas and vatal from

jabali is this on So Close uh Laura I first met Laura actually through an acquisition um of centropy which was the ml safety company she now leads a lot of our key Partnerships within the gaming space as well as across our platform uh Lord can you tell a little can you tell us a little bit about your son and your role at Discord yes absolutely um yeah so as Tim mentioned I joined Discord through an acquisition I was at a machine learning startup before um and at Discord I lead integrated Partnerships which essentially means that I have the privilege of seeing across all the different partner activations that we work on on our team um our team of course partners with gaming companies gaming Studios gaming platforms gaming Publishers um but we also work with a broader array of folks that touch the gaming ecosystem so we

work with AI companies we work with developers of all shapes and sizes we work with media and entertainment companies really anybody that's in that ecosystem that is looking to do more with Discord um and our you know we partner with companies but the mission of our team is really to leverage Partnerships to better serve players to better serve the Discord user so at the end of the day you know our norstar is really making the experience better for Discord users and there's you know three main areas that we we spend most of our time and attention the first is helping users find their friends and play with them wherever they are so we've launched Partnerships with Xbox and with PlayStation that integrate Discord features into consoles so that Discord users can easily find their F friends and play with them uh the second area that we really focus on is helping Discord users really deep in their love for games and showcase their fandom and so we will partner with Brands and companies on collectible drops

Collectibles are um branded Avatar decorations and profile effects that Discord users can buy in the Discord shop and then the last area where we really spend our time is helping Discord users discover great games and great content and so in that area we partner with Brands and companies on quests which is discord's first advertising product um and we also work with companies on apps which I think we're going to talk a lot about today um and apps of course are a way for developers and companies to build third part thirdparty experiences um on Discord and I'll just quickly wrap up by saying um I've been at Discord for a little over three years now and you know Tim touched on this but in that time it's been really amazing to watch the platform evolve from a communication platform into so much more so today Discord is a creation platform it's a distribution platform it's a discovery platform it's a monetization platform there's just so

much you can do on Discord um and I'm excited to get into some of that on the panel that's awesome uh I actually met t uh over a year ago when he was first starting to build on the Discord platform uh and the one thing that really stood out with his co-founder was just the energy and excitement he had uh T can you tell a little about yourself Infinite Canvas and you know how it's been building on Discord yeah absolutely so it's uh it's really wonderful to be here um hopefully I can bring some of that energy that that you uh that stood out to you but um I'm tall I'm the CEO and co-founder of infinite canvas we are a game Studio that uh works on the intersection of user generated games and AI so we build games that are socially and algorithmically distributed um where the core game Loop is powered by Ai and um as Tim mentioned we've been building on Discord for uh I guess a bit over a year now at this point um including one of the things that we'll end up talking about and showing off a little bit later uh which is a AI powered word game

natively built directly into Discord um and um you know a little bit as Laura mentioned we really think of Discord as this multifaceted platform for us it handles everything for from our communication uh with users and players and Community Building to monetization to distribution and Discovery um and it's been a great experience building with them that's awesome and that's all has led product and strategy at a number of Marquee gaming companies um including skills AWS meta and Oculus it's a pleasure to have you on stage can you tell us a little bit about your key insights across those experiences and how you've translated that into your newest company jabali yeah no AB absolutely um um again my name is Vel bhage I'm founder CEO of jabali uh at jabali we are building a AI native game engine to enable developers designers creators to make games um and to games using natural language um to

what you asked I think um you know again we're using Discord in multiple ways we are using Discord to build communities uh you know as we build our product get early user feedback but more importantly we are also building uh on Discord as a way to onboard users to help them build on Discord itself and uh to Echo some of what was saying and you were talking about we I think there is an opportunity here where you can take this card which was played together to now build and publish together and I think that's the direction we are taking to the question you asked earlier you know some of the key insights I had uh especially from my time at know early on Facebook and um then Oculus was for picking a platform to build on the the scale is important but what's

also important is uh the quality of the graph and one thing uh you know as we were thinking about which uh platform do we want to partner build on was really important was you know we viewed Discord as the social graph is actually quite game Centric it's about Gamers connected with Gamers and Gamers connected with other content they like which is again very uh pure and sets up right incentives for the ecosystem and the platform um you know again just contrasting against other platforms which came which may have been just a communication platform or a social platform where those Dynamics do become complicated down the line and so for us as a start of that was really important that we are making bets on the right open platforms and uh where again the platform incentives and our incentives can actually be aligned yeah no that's awesome and then that's definitely something that we're focused on as a

platform and a lot of the work that I and Laura are doing uh tall I would love to to learn more about you know when we first met when you're starting to build on Discord you know what was uh what prompted you to want to build on Discord you know what got you excited uh and motivated to build on Discord yeah so we um like like probably most folks building games here we were already on Discord primarily as a you know communication and Community Building platform so we had a number of games or and still do a number of games on other platforms things like Roblox fortnite so on so forth and we were building our communities and and and actually communicating with most of our players on Discord um and driving them to Discord to build to build those communities and so started investing more and more into engaging our users on Discord and and you know running events all sorts of community building activations and so we were already there um in a pretty deep way and one of the things that we started realizing was that people really were using the

platform as just that a platform starting to kind of almost like hack their way into creating mini games and things of that nature um and you know we've always been really you know focused on and believe that the future of game distribution is going to be social and algorithmic and so it was kind of very natural for us to re you know we're like oh we're already building these communities we have tons of users and players on Discord uh it seems kind of silly to always be then you know shuttling them to a different platform to then come back to Discord um and very natural to actually build directly onto Discord and be able to engage them already where they are and where in critically I I think you know to your point um where their social graph already exists and not just any social graph but one that is intensely focused on gaming um and so it was a very Natural Evolution for us um from using this platform primarily again for Community Building to actually then thinking about well actually maybe we can just build directly onto the platform yeah that's awesome um that's all I'm actually curious similar question but more from the the

infrastructure side and as you work with developers are building on your platform but then also you know Crossing that over to Discord you know how is that shaped how you interact with the platforms how does that interact with you know just in terms of development yeah so um so let me um answer that in two ways so one we you know as we have started onboarding customers onto our platform what we have found is that the community on Discord especially developers they're already you know more tech savvy they are familiar with the platform so onboarding them and getting them going getting them to that which is important again for us getting them to that aha moment of I came in and very quickly I was able to build something and see something I I think that has worked really well for us uh already the second thing I'll say is we also use Discord internally for development and so you know while we have a public Discord server uh which is for Community

even internally we use Discord for all kinds of things for uh internally prototyping features to uh doing test runs for new features so we utilize it in multiple ways that's awesome uh and and T I guess from a developer perspective building on Discord you know how has you know the the ability to connect your community with the social aspects with the social graph you know how does that influence the life cycle from development to the initial building hype and then the launch and then you ultimately translating into long-term engagement in community yeah so so we use Discord across that entire life cycle um so you know even as we're in early stages of development for things that may or may not actually ever fully go live we're engaging our communities and actually starting to build hype for them for projects and getting feedback and kind of giving teasers and you know being very 2024 or I guess maybe 2025 about

gamedev building in public there um and then that allows us to when we are ready to actually launch projects be able to really engage like a core group of you know super supporters right away um which is pretty important especially for folks like us that are focused on uh you know socially and algorithmically distributing games so that we can get that kind of early core mass of you know super users to really push the um push the product push the push the game forward then we take feedback from users and and and game players and quickly iterate on those projects um all directly through Discord and then ultimately continue to engage and re-engage those users not just through communication on the platform but through perks that we give from our servers that connect to the game um and all sorts of other way so it's it really allows us to basically be building I think not just on our own but actually with our players in a way that feels very natural and gives us I think a lot of advantages relative to the old days of kind of going off into a dark room you know programming and then eventually

uh you know serving it up to to the players Laura um just hearing the feedback from both tall and vatal I'm curious to kind of get your input in terms of the community aspects of Discord you know what are what are some of the the success or case studies just in terms of like best practices on the community side yeah absolutely um tall actually hit on this very well you know when when you're looking to do you know build the community on Discord um you know in terms of best practices we always tell people start early even when you're you know you are pre-launch you don't have a product to show them before you launch your product you tall you you that's all you are the product right um and you want to be able to launch to some somebody some Community right so start your community on Discord really early start building that you know even if it's small that small community of folks that are really interested in what you're working on and want to learn more um and then as you get to kind of the

prototyping phases um you can start building directly on Discord you can use our activity and our bot platform to actually put prototypes right on the platform and then get quick feedback from your users in your community but if you haven't started your community then you're not going to have that feedback cycle right so starting your community earlier using your community to really iterate on your product listen to your users find out what they like and then of course when you're ready to launch your product you know if it's a product that you launch right on Discord or even if you're launching on another platform really leveraging your community to be those you know um evangelists for you to like go out and talk about your you know your product and what you've built and how great it is and one thing that's you know great about Discord is it makes that um you know kind of organic marketing um through friends sharing with Friends super easy because everybody's hanging out with their friends on Discord um so those are just kind of some of the the things we talk to Partners about yeah that's awesome and you mentioned oh yeah yeah la I just want to add to what you said one thing I'll also say is um you know while it's

very easy to get going on Discord it takes a while to set up your server correctly figure out onboarding like all of those things so at least in our case um you know we we hadn't even built a prototype when we set up our Discord server and I I think that proved to be really helpful because when we were in fact ready we had we had a server setup we had thought through how we are going to on board what channels so not to say any of this is hard but it does take time so just plus oneing to what you just said on starting early I'm curious how how early did you start before even starting the project so um you know share a quick funny story so me and my colleague toik who is uh in the audience here we were thinking of what should the user experience look like and after 14 hours of exhaustion of like you know trying to design everything we just said you know what

just screw this we'll just use this cord as a way to onboard customers and as a way to enable them to to build product so we I think within one month of development actually started thinking about okay we need to have a Discord server set up and um yeah like by in month three or so when we did our first limited time prototyping and uh exposing the product to 10 15 customers we actually had Discord server set up uh even back then so we started yeah really really early yeah that's great uh Laura you you kind of mentioned that Community is just the starting point um for developers in terms of building a community and then engaging Their audience um I'm curious uh with the launch of open ecosystem last week you know apps are another way to engage uh end users natively on the Discord Network can you talk a a little bit about the app strategy at

Discord yeah absolutely um so building your community um on Discord is is I I do like to tell Partners it's a first step it's a very important First Step but it really is just a first step um uh something I like to share with Partners is that 80% of the engagement that happens on Discord is actually happening in these small private friend servers so think you know five to 15 friends that are hanging out in a private space and so that then you know begs the question of okay so how do I meet my my you know prospective players where they are like how do I get in those private friend spaces and so a lot of what we do on the Partnerships team is actually work with companies on strategies that help them do that um and so you know I previously mentioned uh quest which is our paid uh media product um we also have Collectibles both of those products are you know better suited for more established companies um but they target users wherever they are and so they help you kind of extend your influence on

Discord Beyond just the B bounds of your server um but my favorite tool for getting outside of your server um is apps and um what's great about apps is users can access them from wherever they are on the platform um last week we made a big announcement on Discord that we launched um publicly launched our activity platform um so just a little bit of context here um apps have been around on Discord for a very long time the first iteration of apps that we launched were called Bots if you're a Discord user you're probably quite familiar with Bots um but uh more recently we launched our act a new type of app called an activity an activity is an iframe it's an interactive iframe that you can build into on Discord so you can build games and other great content right into it um and last Thursday we announced announced excuse me that we had launched the platform publicly meaning that anybody can now come to Discord build an activity and launch it to our Global user base of 200

million monthly active users which is pretty amazing we also announced last week that we launched uh monetization for activities monetization has been around for Bots for a little while um but now you can build an activity you can launch it globally and you can monetize it which is pretty amazing um and you know our goal with the activity platform and with the app ecosystem in general is really just to allow developers and comp companies like tall and Vil to be able to build and scale entire businesses on Discord um and you know what's exciting is we we already know that this can work so you know mid journey is a name that I'm sure everyone here is very familiar with uh mid Journey got it start on Discord and a fun fact about mid Journey um is that there are 20 million people in the mid Journey server on Discord but their app is used far far more outside of their server than in it so again apps are just just this amazing tool that if you are a

developer and you want to extend your reach on Discord beyond your server you know building an app is a great way to do that a great way to get into those you know private friend servers yeah that's amazing uh I still remember my first mid Journey experience and creating images uh and it was a mind-blowing experience but it was even more fun when I was able to bring it to my friend group and we were iterating together um tall uh I'm curious with this announcement around the the open ecosystem you know how does that change your strategy how do you think about that as a developer in terms of you know building your game but then also reaching end users as well yeah so you know as as I mentioned earlier um we really try to meet our players where they live so we've been building on Discord for quite a while but we were obviously a bit more limited in the kinds of experiences that we could build for players um if we wanted to keep them directly on Discord so what apps really allows us to do and I think we have a demo that we can show um shortly or yeah even while I guess I'm talking is actually meet those players where they live inside of our server but also

inside of other servers so we're going to show one activity that we've been working on an early demo of a AI powered word game called wordcraft so as you can see and this is happening live my co-founder I think is is playing it in the background um he was able to just launch the experience instantly and immediately Drive players into a gameplay experience um pretty seamlessly in a pretty rich gameplay experience so in this case um he is attempting to solve a word puzzle where we take words and ask the player to perform operations verbs so on so forth to get to a Target Target word um and so players can do this pretty seamlessly instantaneously where they are they can do it alone of course um but also they can actually do it with friends and bring others in which creates a pretty interesting social experience um and because Discord you know is natively a social experience as you can see they players can share content and the game like instantaneously with that graph that you mentioned that are you know other game players so exactly the types of

audiences that we want to reach um and so that enables us to do really fun things like set up you know competitive daily kind of modes um which my co-founder may attempt to try to solve it's a little bit harder than some of these early puzzles that he's playing right now um and we can actually integrate that with perks and other things inside of our server and other servers to create a pretty seamless Rich experience for players that happens exactly where they are where they're already playing um where they're already H out with friends um and that's really just the beginning um I don't know if we're going to show it off now but we can integrate the game with Bots and other apps to give things you know like leaderboards and other types of experiences um and create like a pretty 360 environment for a game player to come find something play something with friends and continue to experience it um with others as they move forward so it it really changes what we can do um and you know this word game is just one example of what's possible that's awesome how do you think about this the different surface areas

uh on Discord and how do you optimize it for you know whether it's for end users or just uh you know reducing the friction to enter your game or Drive New Primitives within your game yeah so so we always try to think about making games based on the strengths of the particular platform that we're on because users have different expectations and different behaviors so one of the things that's great about Discord is that it does have multiple surface areas so there are those small you know 10 to 15 person you know kind of core friend group servers um and so we build our game to encourage kind of intimate social sharing and social gameplay among people that are friends um and you know so as part of that it's like encouraging or or creating game Loops where the mechanics actually encourage you to help a friend or compete with a friend prove that you're much smarter than everyone else uh I think I just got dislodged from a leaderboard so I'm already a little bit upset about that um and so we we really focus on building features for those types of servers but then also thinking about how do we create um surface areas that encourage sharing

outside of just those you know small friend groups so one of the thing you know you mentioned mid Journey which obviously is used to create content one of the things that one of the reasons why I think um Discord is so great for AI powered games and products is because inherently a lot of what you do is create content through your gameplay um and the first thing you want to do is share that and potentially share that more widely um and so we also create sort of opportunities for players to actually kind of I don't want to say spam but broadcast is what I would I would say to uh you know larger audiences um and then encourage players potentially to show up in centralized servers for additional perks and other things like that where they can compete and play with a much broader pool maybe meet new friends so you know overall I think what's so great about the platform is that you can really kind of build for all of these different use cases in one place and have it instantaneously happen seamlessly for a user um which is pretty different from how how you can potentially build on other platforms

yeah that's great but all I'm I'm curious from your angle how you think about the the open ecosystem and then how does that uh expand the aperture in terms of you know the develop different games and developers that you're supporting yeah no so um right now what we're using is you know we activities for us is in development but we're using Bots and for us like we can enable our users to make full games with you know with within a single bot thread so they can go through uh series of prompts and our back end is all AI based and they can make full games and where we are enabling the community is quickly being able to make the game you want to make as a Creator and then sharing it with the community so we have uh you know separate Community set up where the game you make gets showcased it gets published uh to other users in the community so you're using Bots and one of the things I'm excited about is is uh with activities

with some of the things which we saw missing in Bots like ability to do more stateful type applications we are actually quite excited about now moving some of it to activities to be able to not just build butt play and share uh and do multi-user uh Creation in context of Discord itself yeah I just want to quickly just harp on that which is it's really amazing what people can do together when they're both playing the game on the communication platform and able to chat right there um with all sorts of different users and it it really turns it even a single player asynchronous experience ends up becoming this kind of more social multiplayer creative experience um and that's just very unique to the platform and very powerful for driving greater engagement and retention yeah that's amazing definitely the superpower of Discord is being able to have the multiplay multiplayer experience especially with your friends uh as Laura mentioned just in terms of how much our usage is really that core friend use case um and Laura

I'm curious you know as T and and vat has been talking about different apps spots and activities I'm curious like what are the what are some of the most successful apps on Discord yeah um so before I you know talk about this a little bit um I do want to just say that you know we are so early in the life cycle of our app ecosystem um which is a huge opportunity I think um there's so much Greenfield for you know all different types of developers to come and really make a name for themselves on the platform and we've we've already are already starting to see a ton of great successes so you know on the bot side you know of course I mentioned mid Journey but you know we've there's a bunch of other companies that have really scaled on Discord so there's Pika um there's vigle and then the activity platform is you know it's much newer but we're already starting to see a lot of breakout successes so we had a game that launched um recently called Death by AI um it's a very fun party game check it out I promise you'll laugh um but in

their first month after launch they um hit 7 million players and already had thousands of paying subscribers um and you know it's not like a a game name that you would recognize right so um that was pretty impressive we had another game that launched recently called Chef Showdown which hit a million players in its first weekend so we're already starting to see these um you know signs of a really positive traction which is exciting for us um and what's what's also exciting is we're seeing like different types of content be popular and so it's it's really encouraging to us that there's lots of different types of things that can do well on the platform so you know games are you know an obvious um you know popular type of content on Discord um but you know one of our more popular activities is YouTube watch together where you can go watch YouTube videos with your friends um you know I had originally thought that multiplayer games were going to kind of take the cake because discord's such a social platform um and so I thought you know all the breakout successes on at least

the activity platform would be multiplayer we had a um game that launched recently called Farm merge Valley which is a solo player farming game and it's done amazingly well so it kind of broke that you know thought that I had so um really just goes to show that there's you know lots and lots of opportunity um especially given like where we are in the life cycle um there's just so much you can do and build on the platform right now yeah Farm merge Valley is one of my my favorite games I'm spending more time time than I would admit uh just building up a farm and then showing it off um uh just kind of thinking about building on a platform we all we all know it's not always straightforward it's not easy to build on a platform sometimes there's challenges uh to I'm curious you know where is been some of the challenges building on Discord it this I think is the part where I get to ask you for stuff and you try to say yes in front of everyone uh no um look I think like any any platform especially one that's still relatively early in its development of of these types of experiences um you know there's

always some Growing Pains um you know as a developer I can always ask for more distribution and Discovery um there's plenty of tools now especially for activities but it's still early um and so that's definitely an area that we'd love to see you guys continue to push on um we do a lot of hand-to-hand combat still in terms of like partnering with other servers and really trying to get ourselves um that sort of early start um but you know continue would love to honestly be able to pay you guys to promote games as as well so I can't believe I'm admitting that but yes um and then beyond that you know it's still early in terms of monetization and some of the things that we can do with you guys directly in the experience or in the activity um and so you know more tools more opportunities more different ways to actually uh monetize and and connect and engage that monetization not just with our activities but maybe with other things inside of servers and some of the other tools that you guys have built um and then of course it's any platform especially new one testing and actually development is still still a little bit more challenging perhaps than some more mature platforms um but um as

I said what's really great about the platform is you guys have been incredibly you know receptive responsive um and um because so many of the folks on our team are native Discord users we really feel like we kind of understand the audience and understand the user base in a way that is is pretty remarkable um so yeah you know the normal growing you know challenges and pains but um you know I'm this is where I get to push you guys to you know open up more more featuring and you should feature our games of course and no one else's Laura I'm curious if you have any just like feedback or or best practices um no I mean I I think you're right and what's what's actually nice um for me is I would say I'm not surprised by any of the feedback it's it's stuff that we've known about you know for a while and we've actually been investing in a lot and so as you know T mentioned our you know I would say and my our comm's team is probably going to hate me for saying this but like discovery on Discord previously was was really hard um and

we've invested a ton that's one of the like the main pieces of feedback we got from developers was we need better Discovery tools um and so we've invested a ton in that and so we've launched um the app launcher which is our our new kind of app Discovery tool which is amazing we've made apps more accessible so that you can um access apps and play with them wherever you are on the platform um we've launched Rich presence for activities which is one of my favorite things um which essentially means that if you are playing an activity so if I'm you know playing tall's activity in Discord my you know quote unquote status on Discord shows that I'm playing that activity um my friends can see it anyone I'm in a server with can see it and then they can even like request to join if they want to um so we're really investing in that and we actually have a lot more Discovery features coming in the road map so um more to come um and then on the monetization piece you know same thing we just launched monetization for activities um I'd say we still have you know a bit of a ways to go to be a like full full monetization platform with all the you know bells and whistles that

that you would want um and so we're you know but it's on the road map we're investing in it all um and uh yeah we're making a big big bet on the activity platform and um I'm very excited to see over the next you know 12 months um all the new features and tools that are launched yeah it's really exciting and vat I'm I'm curious from your perspective um you know what are some of the challenges that you've experienced as you have you started to build on on the Discord platform yeah so uh so first of all I just agree with what tal said you know again like very excited about the platform and uh in general I would say it's actually very quick to get going and build something where we found ourselves it rating is what a on the product side it requires different way to think about your user experience when you're building on uh Discord as an interface so I I think that's one area the second I would say is is and again as a new platform some of these are to

be expected I think you know we are in our use case we are taking a game engine and trying to embed it into an eye frame so you know some challenges we ran into where just maintaining State um um the other things I would say are um you know and we are early on this but like getting more insights and more ways uh to talk to users so you know we often find lurkers in our on our server and I wish there was an easy way for us to be able to have a conversation with them more onet toone to understand you know if they are not engaged on the server what else we could be doing for them so I would say those are some of the things uh and yes I I'll also agree with Talon you know more Discovery and more more monetization will always be appreciated Laura I'm curious if you have any feedback on on that point

um you know I think uh in terms of you know being able to talk to your users um you know that's that is a tough one I think there's like some server best practices you can use to um to help with that I think there's honestly some Bots you can use to help with getting feedback from your users um and you know chatting with them more often um and you know in terms of like you said you know you're trying to build a whole game um engine in an if frame and yes I imagine that is tough um but I would say there's you know there's so much that's that's coming like we are investing in this platform so heavily and so just hearing this feedback and you know if anybody else in the audience has additional feedback to share is so helpful for us um because we're we're hungry for it we want to know you know what tools and features are going to be the most helpful um so that we can you know quickly put those in our road map so um thank you guys for for sharing that yeah definitely if again if people have feedback we love to hear feedback and that that drives a lot of our

product strategy and where we're investing um the other topic that came up a couple of times is just AI um Discord has become the the Nexus of AI and gaming uh I'm curious uh T if you have any feedback just in terms of you know why Discord has become such a hot bet for AI and even specifically AI uh powered games yeah so I think there's a few reasons so one is just that I think the you know to your point earlier the audience is this really you know great sort of combination of Gamers and technologists and enthusiasts um and tinkerers um and so it's sort of like the natural audience for a lot of this new technology and playing around with it um but I also think it's a has a lot to do with the structure of the of the of the platform so one of the things we discovered um is that a lot of AI products and AI games you know as I mentioned earlier they're like part game part content creation engine and so users and players naturally when they create they want to share and then kind

of have that feedback into their game Loop and because Discord is sort of structured so well for these kind of both intimate conversations and intimate server groups and larger groups it ends up I think being a really great place for that kind of core mechanic to play out one of the really interesting things that we saw is be with this technology right there it typically tends to enable a lot of personalization and individualization and so servers playing different ver you know playing our game in different servers end up developing like different culture is the word that we use internally um where the game actually these games tend to play out a little differently because you can imagine that a lot of what happens is some player does something they create something as part of the game they see something happening there then they kind of Riff on it right they remix um and that might be different from a different servers culture um and so I think it's just both the nature of the people on the platform and the way it's structured really encourages people to feel like they have a safe place and a great place to be able to create and then ultimately share um in a way that's pretty unique

um and feels really in tune with what the core technology does yeah that makes a lot of sense uh but all I know you're you're spending a lot of time in the AI space uh I'm curious like from a developer angle you know how how are you thinking about Ai and then how can you bring that alive on Discord yeah so uh a couple of thoughts one is um you know things are moving and I'm not saying anything which you all don't know things are moving very very rapidly like as we are building an engine building the platform things are moving very very rapidly things which you know experiences which look like toys today um will evolve to being you know first class professional Tools in very very quick time and I think it's both the rapidly falling costs of AI I think these costs are coming down by 90% every year uh uh plus the accessibility and and Discord has a big role to play on introd ucing uh to what tal was saying these early adopters very very

quickly uh to different AI experiences so I think both those things are definitely driving uh you know are definitely Tailwinds if you're building on Discord yeah that's awesome Laura I'm curious if there's any like observations that you're seeing within AI companies you mentioned mid Journey mentioned vigle are there any best practices in terms of you know the intersection of AI and gaming you know honestly I don't think there's any that we haven't already really talked to um but yeah I would just say you know we have such a you know we have a user base that's so hungry for these you know new games new Innovations you especially when it's around Ai and gaming and so um yeah I just think it's like Discord is the place to be if you're at that intersection and you know you're looking for users to interact with to launch your game too um yeah awesome uh I know we're we're coming up at time uh just one last question for the panel you know what advice would you give to if you're

building on Discord uh and then a secondary question you know what's next for you uh in your company on Discord yeah so I think I would just say um ship ear like you know ship ship ship uh like the beauty of the platform is that you can build really quickly you can get it in front of users and you can get their feedback and build together with them um and so that would be my advice is like if you even have like kind of an idea just like don't even really think too much about it just actually go and build and get started um and then in terms of you know what we're what we're going to be doing for the future um honestly continuing to develop wordcraft and a bunch of other games and properties um as activities and as I said kind of um further integrating them into these social communities um and kind of trying to create this new Blended kind of gameplay content creation um engine um that we think really fits the platform awesome uh but all yeah I mean I think tal said it really well I think start early uh and iterate and again for us it's like

doubling down on activities and you know finding new ways to engage the community on Discord Laura anything on the Discord side um so uh my colleague Adriana and I we give a talk to developers a lot on you know how to build on Discord and and all the different tools that we've launched and we always end the talk with a slide that says build cool because we can talk at nauseum about all the tools and the features and everything that we've done on the platform um but at the end of the day the power is really in the hands of the developers um and I truly truly believe you know our our user base is so engaged they're so hungry for new content they're spending so much time on Discord um so I truly truly believe that if you can come to the platform and you can build cool you will get traction um and you will find find success so I'd just leave you with that that's awesome yeah I want to thank the panelists I want to thank Scott and the bdcraft team uh let's go build cool thank you thanks