Because a big “Join our community discord server!” on the game’s title screen isn’t enough apparently. They have to put a flashy animated GIF at the top of every update notification, change the name of the game’s Steam forum to “Join Our Discord!”, and even reply to posts in the Steam forum saying “You should join our discord so we can chat about it!” as if a forum isn’t a good place to chat about the thing that’s already being discussed.
Bitch please, if I wanted to be in the hell that is Discord I’d already be there, you can stop asking.
I know this is very unpopular, but something like Discord is very much preferable for real-time conversations than a forum. The interactions with developers and players is a lot more natural, and having a voice chat is always nice.
Discord can also have separate chat rooms about specific issues that can be tagged and searched.
So the functionality of discord is second to none. The only real issue with discord is enshitification. It is very enshitified, and the only way to mostly circumvent that is to have a custom discord client.
If only Matrix was as fully-functional and easy to install and use with just a click.
I’m with you. I actually like discord.
enjoy it. its a great platform to communicate with your friends in game on.
but its not a place for tech support, breaking announcements, etc etc etc
It is if you want to use it for that.
If everyone that cares about your game is already there, it’s much simpler to use Discord to drop an announcement.
Refusing to acknowledge others opinions by just saying it’s a “you problem” when you disagree is really not conducive to a conversation by the way.
The interactions with developers and players
I don’t want to have interactions with developers, nor other players. Cramming “social media” above the game advertisement itself is… something.
That’s a you problem. Most gamers and developers do want those things and every thriving game I can think of has a very active Discord community.
In my opinion, the biggest issue with pushing communities to Discord is that it traps the information within that platform and their search leaves a lot to be desired.
Discord is a good platform to build a community around a topic, however, more often than not, a lot of solutions to common problems become lost or hard to find for new players/users.
It’s only trapped on Discord if one refuses to ever join Discord. Most people playing games use Discord, so that’s not a real issue for them.
Making things searchable, such as problems and solutions, is dependent on how well managed a community is; over the years I’ve had plenty of issues trying to find something on a forum simply because something like keywords, and tagging didn’t exist or wasn’t enforced, or bug reports were regelated to a single forum thread.
The same it is with Discord. If you’re smart you’ll create a “forum” channel for bug and issue reports and force users to use tags as a rule.
Funnily enough, I actually don’t dislike discord as a platform, I’ve even built servers that have grown to hundreds and thousands of users. I’m also well aware of the attempts discord has made at rectifying the issues I outlined. That being said, it is absolutely a walled-garden and whenever discord’s servers are taken offline, countless amounts of information will go with them. At least with forums or a lot of other platforms, people can easily archive the info, not so much with discord.
discord is a communication platform for friends to game on. nothing more, nothing less.
It should not be an information archive.
It should not be a source of tech support.
It shouldnt be a source of important news/announcements.
All that shit should be on your fucking website, where it can be indexed, archived, and searched for.
Cause discord isolates information in such a way that you will never be able to find out unless you actively use discord, actively hunt down the right discord channel, and properly luck into finding the information.
verses just going to a web browser and typing " [game name] [bug description]" and likely getting the solution, or at least relevant information, in the first 3 returns.
Discord holds information hostage, and kills it should a channel shut down/delete, losing it forever… and anyone that has played older games know that some of that information and community fixing is essential, even a decade+ later.
bring back fucking forums
But it’s all hidden. It’s not searchable or discoverable. I have zero desire to join or be part of discord. It’s like a hidden part of the internet.
If you want to talk about your game put it out in public. You can have a web page a forum and a chat without that stupid shit that is discord.
You’re talking about a place for suggestions and help which can be driven to something like discourse. Which is a platform specifically made for q&A. But it is not well suited for the type of interaction you would expect in a Discord server. It’s not providing the controls and integration that Discord provides, nor is it providing voice chat capabilities and cross interaction.
Discord as much as we all hate it. For the enshitification. is a well-established high population low friction platform for community engagement.
And one of the number one rules when it comes to community engagement is that you go to where your community has the least amount of friction. They don’t come to you.
If that was a community that preferentially used IRC then the developer should preferentially use IRC. Unfortunately, target gaming audiences preferentially use Discord and are already familiar with the platform. Anything else is adding friction that reduces community growth.
These are the facts of the matter. I’m not saying these in support of Discord. It’s kind of a shitty situation
But you could have all of this on your own page. You could run a chat there. You could have forums there.
Discord is friction. You have to join. You have to put up with the shttiest interface. You can’t search and find anything in it if you are not on it.
A game maker that says cone to my discord is going to piss me off and make me not interested in their game.
I am not going to want to join things to find out about them.
And by the way, I really don’t want to talk to anyone about a game, I want to search for issues or report them and move on.
Its a game not an online live discussion
Game devs don’t want to spend time hosting and managing a forum, they want to make a game
Discord isn’t friction as most developers and gamers use Discord regularly. You refusing to use Discord makes you a tiny minority. So it’s friction for you, and you personally.
These same people want an online live discussion about the issues in the game. This again makes you part of a tiny minority that doesn’t want that.
Since you’re part of a minority, developers lose nothing by your lack of interest in the Discord community they’ve created. A game certainly won’t fail if you choose to ignore Discord. Rather, a game is likely to fail if there doesn’t exist any Discord community for it.
Yeah I guess. Hiding their game in a proprietary black hole is their business I guess. In a few years their game will be forgotten all discussion lost and no-one will care.
Again, they could have all the same thing on their own site and include live discussions.
But people want shit apparently so here we are.
And it might be worth pointing put that discord users themselves have begun complaining about server fatigue. Many suggesting they don’t want live support for every game. They want to look up issues and move on.
Isn’t there a limit to the servers you can join? Isn’t it 100? I know many people already at that limit. How are new games going to crack that problem?
Yeah, and for every dozen hours spent on building a “shitty discord” that’s a dozen hours not spent building the game.
And then there’s the high friction. Now people need to sign up for your special website, sign up for your special chat, add another app to their phone if you even provide one…etc When 9/10 of those same people already have a Discord account and are already active on Discord.
You don’t appear to understand what friction means. Because using an established platform that the majority of your community already uses isn’t high friction…
It doesn’t matter what the platform is. You bring yourself to the platform your users use. It just so happens that at this point in time it is Discord and this wasn’t always the case and it won’t always be the case.
You keep talking about how you don’t want to join to find out information how you don’t want to chat about the game.
Okay. That’s fine, that’s your choice, Why are you trying to shove your choice down other people’s throat then, you don’t have to join, you don’t have to talk about the game. It’s not required.
Well from every person I asked who uses discord, the last thing they want is to have to deal with game devs on discord. Making a website and chat is so stupid simple, I question if a gaming dev can make a good game if they can’t do that.
Discord is not the right platform to use as a forum.
Quit trying to make it happen
One day we are going to lose an unbelievable amount of information, but do you know what is simple to archive and bring back, a simple form from 2005.
1000000%
It is literally the worst forum platform in existence. For q&A and support, it’s effectively a black hole for information and not only that, it’s a black hole for effort since people will just ask the same bloody questions day in and day out as the information already on Discord becomes unavailable over time
==========
However, It becomes difficult when you use Discord as a place for your community to chat and to talk with and get feedback from highly engaged players or community members who have things to say about your game and want to talk with each other about the game. You could say that any old form will do here. However, you go to where your community is, you don’t make your community come to you. That only works if you are a bombshell of a title, otherwise, your bounce rate for community members joining and talking and engaging is going to be incredibly high which reduces the chances of your game becoming successful.
Eh, it’s entirely logical.
Let me explain:
- The area that most indi developers underperform at is… Marketing. Many of them put their heart and soul into a game and then completely fail to gather a community or audience that is interested in such a game.
- so what is one of the easiest ways that a developer who has effectively no social media skills can gather a community of interested individuals to talk about provide feedback and announce changes to?
- most of the target audiences for most games are going to be on social media
- You expect to chat with your community and so do your users that care
- Discord is a well-established platform, with a large ecosystem and many integrations meant to target games
- The developer chooses Discord as it is effectively the best option for their situation and available resources
This makes perfect sense. I don’t see why you should be outraged about something of this sort.
That said:
If you don’t want to join the Discord, you don’t have to.
I was like OP. I fucking hate discord.
But then, this little indie game in early access had a bug, but I couldnt find where to email them. So reluctantly, I joined shitty ass discord, sent the dev a screenshot, and within like 15 minutes, the dev was able to figure out the fix.
I stuck around and saw more threads. Updates, future fixes, other people doing speed runs, even a place people were making fan art.
And that’s when he realized Discord isnt so shitty, because that solo dev now has all this conversation and people motivating them.
But then discord sold all his data to GenAI
From the perspective of the indie dev who was able to make a life, career, and grow his audience… Id think they’d be happy with that outcome.
Yep, it’s a practical choice that improves the quality of their work and their community engagement by promoting rapid feedback cycles.
BTW how’d you stumble upon the Indi game?
The thing that I suck at the most is advertised out what I’m making, and it’s hurt me, a lot…
wouldn’t it be 100x better if the same thing was accessible on the public web and searchable?
And then, “@everyone next update coming soon” or whatnot
Thanks for the notification 🫠
(The first thing I do on every Discord server I join is mute it. I want to be very selective about notifications.)
😉
Yea I was steam banned by the stormworks developer because of what I said in discord. Don’t diss trump over there.
Discord is such a piece of trash tool. I have to use Slack for work, which is garbage also, but makes sense in such contrxts, but Discord? I don’t want to feel like using a worse at everything else Slack during my time off.
I get it, building community and such, but come on! Forums are such and easier and friendlier way to do this.
To be honest, Slack is so much worse it’s not even comparable. I haven’t used it in the last year, but I was forced to used it because work and even though they added feature it became slightly worse every time.
Sure, I am forced to use Teams, which is WAY worse than Slack was in the beginning. But Discord is at least fast. It is not a bad piece of software per-se, it is just misused because it is so easy to set up.
I always laugh at the mention of Teams, because it reminds me that at my work we use Teams but the IT department blocked the feature to create teams inside Teams. So instead of Slack is more like a corporate WhatsApp.
They recently finally merged teams, chats, and discussions into one tab, which was probably one of the main pain points and reason why I missed to many messages posted on teams.
The chat is still a mess and I hate it. The calls don’t work about 50% of the time and even tho it is just a PWA in Chrome, it manages to give others echo - not the usual “person X has shitty mic and headphones” type, no, it gives literal 1:1 and the person has to restart tramd and join the call again. The inability to sometimes join the same call on phone and laptop is fucked up - fucking Skype for Businrss could do it, why not this piece of shit that has been developed for several years?!
oh…yeah, forgot about Teams. My employer is using it also and it’s a mess.
Sounds like corporate logic to me. “Successful games have lots of positive community engagement!” Therefore… if we push ‘community engagement’ our game will be successful! Let’s track this metric to see how well this game is doing compared to our 497 other games and whether or not to invest in bug fixes and DLCs.
Damn you seem competent, do you have an MBA?
Nope, just your run of the mill cynic.
The only time I would even stop for a second to consider that maybe it’s a good thing for devs to be like “Join Our Discord!” would be for things like pokemon fan games or something like Plants VS Zombies Universe, where Sintendo or EA could come in and drop nukes on these innocent enough seeming ( most of the time ) devs.
I obviously don’t want the corpo clown creeps coming in and destroying under development fan games ( especially PVZ Universe or Pokemon Empire ), but surely we must have better platforms to hide projects on, right? I mean, come on, we’re living in the year 2026, not 2006.
Two questions:
Which game?
What would they win with having players on the Discord server?
A lot of small indie or fan games love to hide on Discord. Got banned? Appeal it on Discord. Wanna submit feedback? Come on over to Discord!
What do they gain from this? Besides making their content impossible to find in search engines, clearly they’re optimizing for maximum inconvenience and peak exclusivity. Nothing says “accessible community” like forcing players to re-ask the same questions in a walled-off chat nobody can Google.
Upselling
Because having your entire community on one platform is just a hell of a lot more convenient and manageable especially for smaller development studios. And Discord offers way better tools for moderation and real time discussions than any other tool I know.
Sure, the searchability via search engines is pretty much none existent. But then again, you don’t really need that if all information regarding your game can be found via the Discord search.
Additionally, players from all platforms can contribute and ask questions on Discord. The same is not true for e.g. the Steam User Forum.
There’s a lot of problems with Discord and I feel like it’s only gonna get worse now that they’re public. But being blatantly oblivious to the obvious reasons why developers are choosing Discord over its alternatives helps no one.
I posted a negative review of kithack model club over this exact issue and got 50/50 clown to other awards on it. When I also talked a bit about it on the steam forums, I noticed there’s a guy who clearly isn’t working for the dev and goes to every post to tell them to go to the discord. I’d be fine with that if he didn’t also argue with anyone who doesn’t think that’s good. Some people man.
If I’m not interested that means I’m probably not going to bring anything interesting for the discussion
If I’m not interested that means I’m probably not going to bring anything interesting for the discussion
Ever tried to have a discussion on discord? It’s the most infuriating thing I have ever encountered.
What issues did you have with it? Too busy? Overeager mods? Bad organization?
On very busy channels, and this will probably sound weird, but it all just scrolls too fast to have a conversation. It’s like being in a room at one corner trying to talk with someone in another corner and the room is filled with other people all trying to have conversations using the same voice level. The only other analogy I could come up with is trying to have a conversation with a race car driver using his or her window mid race, and you just yell at each other every time they pass your corner.
Even when it isn’t flying by on a busy channel sometimes it’s just endless scrolling to find the beginning of the conversation or where you need to get it to get an idea of what’s going on. And their solution to that just made things worse in my opinion…
It has it’s purpose, and for my group it’s voice and being able to store notes that we can scroll back through if we need.
That makes sense.
I’m certainly of the camp that it’s bad for developers to use to coordinate with their communities via discord in part because it’s terrible for documentation/disorganized.
Guess I’ve just never given super big discord channels the time of day since they seem about as productive as a major twitch streamer’s chat. Like you said, a bit like screaming into an avalanche, everything is lost to the noise.
a bit like screaming into an avalanche
I like that, and might use that in the future.
Since you mentioned developers using it to coordinate with their community, I also have seen a pattern where the channel owner invites people to come chat with them and the other people involved. Then when someone invariably pings someone on the team they get scolded for it. Pick one, availability to the people you invited, or stay private. Can’t have both.
I hate discord with a passion. I wish we’d go back to message boards - properly indexed websites that you can search to find discussions on things you need.
Surely IRC would be what you want to replace discord? Or matrix.
Going back to IRC would be fun.
Discord is okay for chat, but a lot of communities seem to think that Discord is a perfectly cromulent support channel… I guess that’s cool if you like to answer the same question a bunch, and want it to be impossible for people to find their answers via Google.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I didn’t think that IRC did any archiving, so it’s actually worse than Discord in that respect.
Sites that I use IRC with collect and index the logs and have them searchable on their website.
Not natively, but you could log it locally and I guess publish that to a site or something
It kills me every time I see a support or community forum fall to Discord.
Fuck, even PROFESSIONAL APPS have started doing this shit (example Parsec).
Thank the gods I’m not the only one! Chat rooms are a terrible way to get community feedback, and the bigger the community, the worse it gets. I tried it a couple of times and find it nigh on useless.
Guess you’ll have to leak secret military documents the old-fashioned way: posting them on the War Thunder forums.
Hold up, are people really stupid enough to send classified documents over fucking Discord?
…now I think about it, I don’t know why I even asked, there’s always one who’s stupid enough to do ANYthing.
It’s actually a running joke because so many people post classified military documents to the warthunder forums
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