Discord
Chat and voice platform that grew out of gaming communities. It publishes safety transparency reports, including a report on child protection under Brazil's ECA Digital law.
Documents
No published documents yet
Reports about Discord
407 documents by other writers name Discord in the title or summary.
How to Talk to Your Customers
Direct engagement with players is a critical, underutilized strategy for game developers to refine their products and marketing efforts.
- Directly interviewing fans via 15-30 minute voice calls provides deeper, more actionable product and marketing insights than passive digital feedback.
- To find interviewees, reach out to active community members on Discord, engaged newsletter subscribers, or fans of similar games found through Steam reviews.
- When interviewing players, ask specific questions about their gaming history, discovery channels, and desired feature improvements rather than generic satisfaction questions.
How to Talk to Streamers
The primary purpose of this analysis is to advocate for a relationship-based approach to game marketing, moving beyond anonymous cold-emailing toward direct engagement with content creators.
- Streamers prioritize games with 1,000 to 10,000 concurrent viewers, as playing titles outside this range carries a significant risk of losing their audience.
- Streaming is often a social hobby rather than a career, meaning developers should focus on building genuine personal relationships rather than treating streamers as mere marketing channels.
- Streamers frequently build their own audiences through 'raiding,' where they pass their viewers to other streamers, creating tight-knit networks that developers can leverage.
Why Forums Can Be Great for Indie Community and Discoverability
Building a sustainable community is a critical factor for the financial success and discoverability of indie games, with 96% of surveyed developers acknowledging its importance.
- 96% of surveyed indie developers identify building a sustainable community as a critical factor for both financial success and game discoverability.
- While Discord is the most popular hub for real-time chat, many studios struggle with the fragmentation caused by managing multiple channels across various social media and storefront platforms.
- Centralized, proprietary forums—using software like Invision—allow studios to consolidate community efforts, cross-promote multiple titles, and maintain long-term ownership of user data.
Summer Special: How Devs Should Reach Out to Top YouTubers
The primary purpose of this analysis is to provide actionable guidance for game developers on influencer outreach while examining the statistical relationship between Steam tags and game popularity.
- Prioritize professional outreach by providing immediate access to Steam keys and trailers via direct channels, avoiding social media or public Discord servers for pitches.
- Ensure at least one week of lead time for content production and align pitches with a creator’s specific audience to respect their need for entertainment and financial viability.
- Focus on the top five Steam tags, as these are critical indicators of pre-release Hype scores; the 'Open World Survival Craft' tag currently leads with a median Hype score of 160.
Strategies of Anonymity in Game Workers Unite UK
Paolo Ruffino's paper examines Game Workers Unite UK (GWU UK), a labour union founded in January 2019 as the first national branch of the global Game Workers Unite group.
- Game Workers Unite UK, founded in January 2019, is the first national branch of the global Game Workers Unite group and is defined by its techniques for protecting member anonymity: members stay unnamed publicly and total membership figures are withheld to prevent delegitimization.
- Board members take on visible public roles to represent the union and negotiate with employers, and this exposure carries substantial personal risk, illustrated by the October 2019 dismissal of organizer Austin Kelmore from the independent studio ustwo.
- Ruffino frames the anonymity-based approach as both pragmatic and consistent with United Kingdom labour law, though it requires careful preparation.
Gaming Industry Report: Serbia 2020
Serbia's gaming industry reached record revenue of roughly €120 million in 2020, up about 20 percent year over year.
- Serbia’s video-game industry reached over €100 million in revenue in 2020, marking a 20 percent year-over-year growth across 120 development teams.
- The sector employs approximately 2,100 people, with women accounting for one-third of the workforce and a majority of firms planning to increase staff in 2021.
- Educational infrastructure expanded significantly with new programs at the University of Kragujevac and the University of Arts in Belgrade, supported by partners like Epic Games and Nordeus to serve over 1,500 students.
How I Handle Playtesting
Effective playtesting is essential for indie game development, serving as a vital mechanism to bridge the gap between a developer’s internal perspective and the actual player experience.
- Triangulate feedback by combining qualitative survey data with quantitative game analytics to distinguish between isolated player opinions and systemic design issues.
- Use objective game analytics—such as tracking level starts, death counts, and completion rates—to identify and smooth out unintended difficulty spikes.
- Gather qualitative insights by asking playtesters to write hypothetical Steam reviews, providing a realistic preview of how the market will perceive the game before final release.
Public Relations with Michael Brown | Game Dev Unchained Episode 210
The modern gaming landscape has undergone a fundamental shift, moving away from traditional press-led discovery toward a model dominated by influencers, streamers, and platform-specific algorithms.
- Marketing and public relations budgets should account for approximately 50 percent of the total development cost, with a minimum recommended spend of $50,000 to $80,000.
- Developers should engage PR professionals at least one year before launch to ensure project viability and maintain a clear, executable vision.
- An optimal development cycle lasts one to two years, which provides sufficient time for audience cultivation while avoiding the fatigue associated with longer production timelines.
Game Jam Showcase - ep 5 - Passage - Extra Credits
This showcase highlights a selection of standout entries from a community game jam centered on the theme of passage.
- Game jams with tight four-day development windows effectively force developers to prioritize core mechanics and creative problem-solving under strict resource constraints.
- The 'Passage' theme successfully inspired diverse interpretations, ranging from traditional digital puzzle games like 'The Hallway' to physical card-based walking simulators like 'Momentary'.
- Developers are increasingly utilizing unconventional platforms for gameplay, such as the strategy MMO '80 Days' which operates entirely within a Discord server.
The Stairstep Approach to Indie Game Marketing
The stairstep approach to indie game marketing provides a structured framework for developers to align their promotional efforts with their current stage of professional growth.
- Indie developers should adopt a 'stairstep' approach to marketing, scaling their tactics based on their current level of experience and commercial success rather than mimicking the high-level strategies of major studios like Blizzard or Nintendo.
- At Level 0 (first-time developers), 95% of effort should be dedicated to finishing a game, with marketing limited to one social network, a simple mailing list, and direct, personal engagement with players.
- Early-stage developers should prioritize 'doing things that don't scale,' such as having 1-on-1 conversations with players and personally soliciting feedback from those who leave positive reviews.
Game Discoverability Day: Crowdfunding Your Video Game in 2019
Crowdfunding serves as a specialized but enduring financial mechanism for independent game development, maintaining a steady cadence of approximately one successful project per day on Kickstarter.
- Success on Kickstarter is driven by a pre-existing community rather than platform organic reach, with the platform maintaining a steady rate of approximately one successful project per day.
- Achieving 20% of a total funding goal within the first 48 hours is a critical milestone required to maintain the momentum necessary for a successful campaign.
- While total annual funding has declined from 2015 peaks to roughly $15 million, the platform remains viable for projects ranging from small indie titles to those seeking over $500,000.
ONLINE MULTIPLAYER | A Game Dev Answers.
Developing competitive online multiplayer games presents significant technical and community-building challenges for independent developers.
- Implement robust networking solutions like Photon Unity Networking (PUN) early, prioritizing data efficiency by converting floats to integers and using serialization streams to minimize packet sizes.
- Transition from client-side networking to authoritative server models as a project scales to effectively mitigate cheating and ensure long-term game stability.
- Integrate Discord directly into the game UI with automated prompts that trigger during long matchmaking wait times to facilitate organized play and prevent refund requests.