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
482 documents by other writers name Discord in the title or summary.
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.
What Is Word-of-Mouth?
Word-of-mouth, often cited by indie developers as the most important form of marketing, is rarely defined in concrete terms.
- Word-of-mouth functions as a final gatekeeping mechanism where potential buyers verify a purchase by consulting friends who own the game or have similar tastes.
- Steam's interface facilitates this process by allowing users to see which friends own a game, how many hours they have played, and whether they have wishlisted it.
- Developers should identify and cultivate relationships with 'Steam Elites'—influential players within social groups who act as primary recommenders for their peers.
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
Marketing advice for indie developers should be matched to a studio's stage of development, argues this 2019 blog post, rather than copied from large publishers or applied as an exhaustive checklist.
- 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.
Methodology for a Qualitative Study of Steam
An independent game developer with seven years of UX design experience outlines the methodology behind a qualitative study of how Steam users discover, wishlist, and buy games.
- To capture authentic user behavior, researchers should use 'contextual inquiry'—a combination of open-ended interviews and direct observation—rather than relying on self-reported data, which is often skewed by social desirability bias.
- When studying Steam purchasing habits, it is critical to target the '1% group' of gamers who own 107 or more games, as they account for 33% of all copies of games sold on the platform.
- Avoid offering participants monetary incentives to spend during a study, as receiving a gift can artificially alter their natural purchasing behavior and decision-making process.
Gaming is the Ascendant Consumer Tech Category
Eric Seufert argues that gaming will be the ascendant consumer technology category of the coming years, largely because new social products can no longer reach mainstream scale.
- The modern mobile ecosystem is hostile to new social platforms due to the advertising duopoly of Facebook and Google, platform-level distribution gates, and stringent privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
- Gaming has emerged as the ascendant consumer tech category because it effectively utilizes the 'Three Cs'—collaboration, competition, and communication—to drive user engagement and virality.
- Unlike social apps that require massive scale to monetize through advertising, games achieve sustainable unit economics at launch by selling in-game items or leveraging ad networks that aggregate impressions across multiple titles.
Watch and Learn: The Meteoric Rise of Twitch
Twitch, the Amazon-owned live streaming platform, has grown from a niche gaming service into the dominant force in spectator gaming, and brands need a deeper understanding of its audience as competition intensifies.
- Twitch maintains a dominant position in live streaming, capturing over 70% of all live hours watched as of 2019, despite increasing competition from platforms like Mixer, Discord, and HUYA.
- The core Twitch audience is predominantly male (two-thirds) and young, with 72% of users falling within the 16–34 age demographic.
- Twitch users exhibit a strong preference for community-driven interaction, being 1.5 times more likely than the global average to value brands that connect them with other fans.
Greycroft | Venture Capital Funding of Game Companies
Venture capital has become a foundational element in the growth of the modern gaming ecosystem, supporting major industry players ranging from mobile studios like Supercell and Rovio to infrastructure companies like Twitch and Discord.
- Venture capital firms like Greycroft, through its GC Tracker fund, focus on seed-stage investments in gaming, esports, and VR/AR, prioritizing teams with scalable visions.
- The investment landscape has matured from speculative social and mobile gaming funding to a model driven by rigorous metrics, specifically customer lifetime value (LTV) and acquisition costs.
- PC and console development remain difficult to fund via venture capital because their unpredictable revenue cycles conflict with the steady-state revenue models preferred by most firms.
Kingdoms and Castles Postmortem
Kingdoms and Castles achieved commercial success by prioritizing iterative market validation and a disciplined approach to development scope.
- Validate game concepts early by setting measurable engagement goals, such as achieving 25 retweets on Twitter, to determine if a project is worth pursuing before committing significant development time.
- Use crowdfunding and early market testing to determine appropriate project scope, allowing developers to scale development effort based on actual audience interest rather than arbitrary timelines.
- Prioritize 'player fantasy' by ensuring the game's core loop and mechanics are intuitive and rely on existing cultural knowledge, which reduces the need for complex tutorials and extensive UI explanations.