Discord app gave up the game label to become a popular chat app

Chat and voice chat app Discord was initially launched solely for the gaming world and gaming community. Discord also opened an online game store and a monthly subscription service for games. But now, they announced Discord will change to become a more universal communication platform.

“We designed the original Discord app for chat. No news, no likes feature. There is no algorithm to decide what news you see.” Discord founder and CEO Jason Citron writes. “We developed Discord to create the experience and feeling the team wanted to create: engage with your community and friends.

“As you increasingly use Discord to play games, our brand can’t keep up, and the way we talk about Discord is misleading the world with our message, making it hard for you to grow your community. more widely on Discord. And we know that when someone briefly interacts with our service, it can be misleading because Discord is complex with many features.”

To reduce that complexity, Discord says it’s “simplified the experience for new users,” and added server interfaces to simplify the process of creating new servers on the app. Bugs fixed, voice and video capabilities increased, quality and reliability remain Discord’s “top priority”, and just launched a “Safety Center” to let users know the rules and tools to deal with them. deal with unwelcome interactions.

Other than that, Discord has some obvious changes ahead. The Discord website has changed: the discordapp.com website has disappeared to replace discord.com and the tagline is now “Your place to talk”. The game isn’t mentioned as much as it used to be, “to make sure everyone can join in the fun and make Discord more friendly.”

Discord’s ambition to expand is understandable during the COVID-19 pandemic, making meeting software like Zoom more popular. It also prompted Discord to increase its stream viewership limit in March, from 10 to 50, to cater to user demand.