Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I understand Slack's valuation as it targets huge companies with up to decades-long contracts and has projected revenues > $1B for this year, but I just don't see Discord making money the same way. I use it daily with my friends, but none of us have Nitro (although the features are pretty neat). The only way I see it moving to profitability is doing targeted ads (which will significantly hinder user experience).
I see it going the way of Xfire[1].
With that said, i agree that no one "cares" about Discord. If a better thing comes along i could easily see people dumping it. But, i imagine it'll be a bit more difficult. Discord "won" in my view because it simply had to be modern to be vastly superior. However, i'm unsure how easy someone can make a next version that is such a superior leap.
Fwiw, as a gaming voip/chat i still find it a pretty great UX. My only complaint is that it is a bit laggy due to the, i assume, web-based interface on "desktop".
Discord "won" because it's literally burning cash and offering a service for free (for example, I don't have to pay for a t2.micro instance to host a Mumble server). But this is obviously not sustainable.
If you're selling a dollar for fifty cents, it's not hard to find a market.
My friend circles on discord have enough people with nitro that it's almost certainly cash-positive by a lot.
The price wasn't the issue (imo), it was simply the user experience. It had the best, by leagues. Users (ie, non hosts) didn't pay for any of these products, but the UX of Discord was vastly superior in my view.
I'd rather install something compared to using the "webapp" version if it used 30 MB of RAM rather than 3000MB.
The last time I used Slack it was a giant memory hog and used a lot of CPU resources. I don't think Discord would have become nearly as popular compared to say Mumble or Teamspeak it was not also relatively efficient in terms of system resources because PC gamers are very sensitive to big resource hogs.
As far as becoming a digital retail storefront, it has zero advantages compared to the other various competitors. While the other digital retailers do have social features, those social features are generally add-ons that aren't critical to the experience. Many of those storefronts also have API hooks that many developers rely upon for certain game-relevant social features like joining a friend's game in progress.
You don't think Discord has any lockin? For a lot of games, coordinating voice chat these days is "paste a discord server invite in chat". Pretty much any guild/clan/subreddit/group/whatever has a Discord (apart from ones with really old TS servers etc), so if you're in one of those, you probably have Discord. Much easier than negotiating Skype/Mumble/TS3.
I'd say Valve/Steam is feeling a lot more pressure these days than Discord.
I'm not sure Discord will ever be a hugely valuable company, but judging by the fact that every launcher in existence (Steam, Battle.net) is trying to clone their features, I'm sure they can at least sell it for quite a bit.
I was really expecting them to push out of the gaming niche, but with the store it looks like they're doubling down on that angle.
Different portions of gamers exist, and all that.
Lately Skype became too buggy to use as IM, but sound is still solid.
That's more than enough reason to never touch the flaming pile of shit that Skype is today, thanks to corporate development strategies and bloat.
How about "Not being too buggy to use as IM"?
I am speaking of roughly a decade ago, around CoD4 and L4D we often used Skype.
Also, xfire to chat. Which was an awesome program at the time!
There was a period when I went back to a WoW expansion that everyone was trying to go everyone onto Skype for pickup groups which was a horrible experience.
But maybe that's just an EU tropism.
Teams is better than Skype or Lync, but that is a very, very low bar to clear.
I think Amazon is a more likely acquirer considering they already have Twitch and Discord could vertically integrate with their cloud + it will make their ecosystem better for eventually launching a Steam competitor which I am 100% sure they plan to do at some point
A Microsoft buyout would kill the thing just like Skype.
This is accurately the current state of affairs, but these are presented like conclusions you make on an industry that's a half century old at least. Gaming was a tiny niche not 15 years ago. It's entered the mainstream less than 10 years ago. It surpassed the film industry not 2 years ago in revenue. Pirated games almost had more volume than official sales in the 90s. All these things have changed, and are still changing.
The games and games-adjacent industry is changing at a blinding speed. Maybe it'll turn into a steaming junkpile like the mobile app market. But maybe it won't. Kids are growing up with games normalized. Everyone is digital, and games are on anything digital. Incumbents that don't keep up will definitely dwindle in their influence. Big players trying to break into the industry have failed to understand the changes. Everyone said similar things when Twitch had a $2B acquisition by Amazon. I think it was underpriced, they are doing incredibly well. Price-averse? There are people literally throwing (digital) money at streamers just for fun, or to troll them, or to get their message announced on stream, or any number of random antics a streamer sets up. But really only in the last year.
A rapidly changing industry is all about timing, and Xfire was sadly too soon, internet multiplayer gaming was not the mainstream and internet/tech infrastructure for it was not as mature either. No-one can tell these things in the present, but I think now is as good a time as any for Discord to do well.
I think the industry and market, if not Discord itself (which has good execution for a fertile market), is still being seriously underestimated.
The magic of twitch (and league of legends, and a few more) is that this is indeed a very price-sensitive crowd, but one that is willing to engage in a steady stream of frequent capex-style microtransactions while refusing to touch opex/subscription-based models.
I don't even have netflix or spotify or any subscription service, but I find it worth my $5/month to support the one streamer I enjoy tuning in to whenever I want some background entertainment while doing things around the house, and I think that's not an uncommon usecase.
It's also about personal connection with a community, which is something that was lacking on the internet after the era of forums died out.
I don't know how you could think this unless you mean something like esports gaming. Gaming has been mainstream for quite some time, as early as the late 80's I'd say, complete with tv show, toy, and movie tie ins. PC gaming was a little less prevalent, they cost a lot more than consoles of the era.
As recently as 15 years ago, a "game console" (home or portable) was mostly something upper-middle-class children owned. 10 years ago, we all got smartphones, and those smartphones got app stores, and suddenly everyone owned a game console (whether they wanted to or not), with a constant stream of games—often free games—coming out for it.
Mario got a movie in the 80s. Pokemon got Thanksgiving day floats in the 90s. But in neither of those cases was everyone playing; everyone was just aware of the brand (mostly because their kids were playing.)
Meanwhile, if you union the sets of people who have played just Candy Crush, Minecraft, and Fortnite at this point, it's probably something like half the global population. Gaming really did "blow up" in the last decade.
This doesn't strike me as a useful definition of mainstream.
I live in Vietnam and I guarantee you that no one here could tell you a single thing about baseball, The Beatles, or Elvis.
Hell, just go to Australia/UK and no one will be able to explain baseball to you. Just like you can go to the US and no one understands cricket even though nearly 1 billion people (albeit primarily in the ex-British Commonwealth) do.
In any case, your claims about the video game market 15 years ago (in 2003) aren't accurate. In 2003 videogames in the US sold 240 million units. 54% of American households bought a new videogame -- that's far from "mostly something upper-middle-class children owned".
15 years ago 32% of households were already playing video games on a mobile device (phone, PDA, handheld game system). 35% of parents said they played video games. 69% of households said they played computer & video games.
15 years ago 2/3rd of Americans played video games. It was already mainstream. Sure, it has gotten MORE popular since then. But that doesn't mean it wasn't mainstream.
It wasnt mainstream in the 90’ies which is where i predicted that one say you would be able to score girls by being a famous gamer.
For a preview of what video games being "mainstream" looks like: South Korea. It's not unthinkable we could get there in the west.
as reference, according to wiktionary, mainstream is Used or accepted broadly rather than by small portions of a population or market. I think that definition can encompass 40,000,000 households owning consoles.
Wii Sports (12 years old) sold 80 million copies. That's more than any album ever.
Individual videogames regularly sell more than MUSIC and have done so for well over a decade.
I don't know what definition of mainstream there is where something sells 80 million copies and still isn't mainstream.
Super Mario Bros sold over 40 million copies.
Both of those games are 30 years old. Wii Sports was not even close to being one of the first mainstream games.
The original Pokemon games sold over 30 million copies, inspired a massive worldwide TV show, and that was over 20 years ago.
I'm pretty sure this was different in the 80s.
http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/12/15/who-plays-video-games-...
(contemporary example: Taylor Swift is decidedly mainstream. Does everyone listen to Taylor Swift? No. At best half of teens and twenty-somethings and drops off going through olders. Does everyone know someone who listens to Taylor Swift? Pretty much.)
No. Unless you're talking about a country other than the US, this is absolutely incorrect.
Original Playstation sold more than 40,000,000 units in the U.S., and in the same console generation N64 sold another 20,000,000. On the portable front, the original Gameboy & Color version, beginning in 1989, sold more than 40,000,000 units. Keep in mind, there were only about 80,000,000 households.
There are not 40,000,000 upper-middle class households in the US. For reference, the original gameboy cost $90, roughly $180 in today's money. This is not out of reach for even poorer households. In today's dollars, even if you draw the "upper middle" line relatively low at about $100k for a family of 3, there's only about 30 million households at that level, and 16 million of them don't even have kids.
I'm not debating that video games have become even more popular in recent years, but they were mainstream long before that. "Mainstream" doesn't mean "everyone". The simple wiktionary definition is simply "Used or accepted broadly rather than by small portions of a population or market." I'd be hard pressed to say that millions upon millions of console owners isn't "used broadly".
My point with that statement was more about the image than the reality. Go back to 2002, and ask a legislator—or any childless 40-year-old—"who plays video games." That's the answer they'd give. Yuppies. Children of yuppies. (Then the XBOX hit and it became "college-student yuppies and urban youth." No market shift happened in reality; it was just advertising causing a change in perceived image of gaming as a hobby.)
> households
I really think "households" is a bad way to measure anything about gaming, because the particular way that gaming wasn't mainstream in the 1970s-2000s (besides older people just never having experienced it) was that it was incredibly male-coded.
In 2003, a girl sitting around playing GBA games was still considered to be doing something "tomboyish." It wasn't until the release of the Nintendo DS in 2004 that there was any large-scale availability of games specifically targeted at female demographics. All the home consoles were advertised at boys, and mostly had games for boys (that being the explicit localization strategy of the American branches of Nintendo and Sega through the 90s; it began changing by the early 2000s partly due to the influence of Sony, partly the diminishment of Sega, and partly the reining-in of NoA by Nintendo Japan.)
PC games were more gender-neutral (because PCs weren't advertised at kids to begin with, but in homes as a side-effect of parental usage), but AAA releases targeted at girls were still few and far between. There was... The Sims? That's all I can think of. When I ask the women I know about the games they played in that era—of their own volition, rather than because someone handed them a controller—the only other one they tend to name is Myst. Oh, and DDR, but DDR seemingly wasn't really "a video game" in their minds, in the sense that made them think of themselves as "the type of person who plays video games."
And maybe girls around you didn't play videogames, but they certainly did where I was, about as much, but maybe a little less. you're assumptions here are simply wrong.
No it's not. "Pop culture" (or "mainstream"-ness) must reach even "a member of the elite class", to be pop culture. The point at which something becomes "pop culture", is precisely the point at which it becomes equally likely that you've heard of it, no matter which demographics you're a part of. If there's even one demographic (like busy rich old white men) that can still be completely isolated from a thing's "reach", then that thing is not pop culture yet.
If all 20-year-olds know about something, but all 40-year-olds do not know about that thing, then that thing is not "pop culture" (or "mainstream", either-or.)
On the other hand, if 10% of ten-year-old boys and eighty-year-old women and plumbers and astrophysicists and farmers and investment bankers have all heard of the thing, then it is "pop culture."
Try that criterion out. It really does work:
• Beanie Babies? Pop culture.
• Pogs? Not really pop culture. They were a fad, but they died out before they reached universal intelligibility.
• The movie Titanic? Pop culture.
• The movie The Matrix? Not quite pop culture. My grandma hasn't seen it. Yours probably hasn't either.
• Pokemon in general? Not pop culture.
• Pikachu in particular? Pop culture. (Thus the recent movie.)
• Snoopy? Pop culture. Americana, even. ("Americana" being a word meaning "pop culture, but pretty much only in America, so we've latched onto it as a thing that reminds us of America.")
• Hello Kitty? Pop culture elsewhere, but not-so-much in America, despite what certain stylists like to think.
It is by this same criteria that I claim that "video games up to 2003" were not—as an abstract gestalt—part of pop culture, and that "video games starting in 2004"—as an abstract gestalt—were part of pop culture. They went from being "Hello Kitty" to being "Snoopy"; from being "The Matrix" to being "Titanic"; from being "Pogs" to being "Beanie Babies."
And I hate to be insulting but I can’t imagine you being an adult. I’m fairly certain every adult here knew who sonic and Mario were and none of us would be so ignorant as to say gaming only went mainstream in the last fifteen years.
Your "insult" literally corroborates what I'm saying. Until within the last 15 years, we weren't adults. The "adults" of then very likely did not know who sonic and Mario were, even if their kids did. Now that we're adults, adults know who sonic and mario are. And so do our kids. And maybe some of our parents. That's the point.
Please don't start of comments on HN calling people "son", then claim to "hate to be insulting", then proceed to insult people. None of that was necessary to make your points.
A couple years out of college, I actually did start a casual game company. Ended up giving up on it because by then I didn't really keep up with or care much about the gaming industry, but not before launching a website that hosted ~100 or so games, and getting some initial users. Most of our traffic came from the Northeast Corridor of the U.S. during the hours of 9 AM - 6 PM EST weekdays.
I recently took a glance around the gaming world. It's amazing how much it's changed. There are more AAA titles than you could possible know about. There are massively-multiplayer F2P games that people spend hundreds of dollars on. People will actually pay to watch other people play games, and there are folks who make full-time livings streaming games on Twitch.
It's different than it was in the 80s. Almost all the kids I grew up with had Nintendos or PCs, but it was a kids thing. Those kids are adults now, and they have disposable income (though not necessarily a lot of it), and the idea of climbing the corporate ladder is becoming less and less attractive to many people because corporations have made a habit of pulling the ladder out from under you just as you're halfway up. So people put the minimum amount of effort needed to not get fired into their jobs, and they spend their competitive energies in one of thousands of different games on their nights, weekends, and occasionally (if server logs are to be believed) workdays.
It's probably bad for the competitiveness of the American economy, but it's been great for the gaming industry.
The way I see it, advancing in one's career is about gaining more and more skills and experience to merit a higher paycheck, which is a proxy for the value one provides to their employers and the market in general. The proxy is definitely not perfect, but it's the best one we have.
So under this view a career is inherently meaningless, at least if you are willing to attribute meaning to people providing value to one another, which I definitely do. I don't think that video gaming (at least on one's own) is as meaningful for society.
Under the view of the grandparent, the metric/proxy of salary has become so utterly meaningless because of modern day business behavior that it is no longer a meaningful thing to pursue (or never was).
I personally also have some problems with your view. According to you a corporated lawyer earning $500/hour by drafting contracts is 50x as valuable to society as someone earning $10/hour caring for disabled people, which I think is very untrue. What "the market" values and what we as people should value only has a partial correlation.
Another example, a lot of people value their family and children above all else, while having children leads to almost zero reward from "the market".
Salaries are in essence what we are willing to pay one another for each other's time and effort. In your example, people are willing to pay a person 50 times as much for drafting a contract than for taking care of a disabled person. I don't see anything inherently wrong with this. There could be various reasons explaining this disparity, ranging from a lack of availability of people who can do that, to that job potentially being more difficult in some ways, and probably also down to it being more important in some ways, e.g. directly affecting the lives of thousands of people. Whatever the reasons are, the people who choose to pay the fee were probably unable to negotiate a lower fee for a similar level of work.
On the other hand, the question of "what we should value" is much more amorphous and I'd be interested to hear of ideas on how to model and practically implement that, if you have any. There only alternative frameworks I'm familiar with are communism, with its well known share of problems and "time banks" which I've seen working decently well at a local level, but don't tend to scale.
What we’re seeing that’s new is the confluence of a few things that have led to game playing becoming a mainstream career and the existence of game players that are celebrities as a result.
The other trend I see is that more ubiquitous access to the internet means more kids hang out with their friends in games as a means to socialise. But this was by no means a niche thing in 2008 there was just a higher barrier to entry. For example XBox Live debuted in 2002.
Might be a bit early for 13.
Erm, Ever heard of the Sony Playstation? That was more than 20 years ago. You better recheck your timeline.
> The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from Firstmark, ___Tencent___, IVP, Index Ventures and Technology Opportunity Partners.
All and every big Chinese company seeks to exfiltrate cash out of the country no mater what the justification is.
That way you have China Rail buying Canadian casinos, tech companies buying American pig farms, and a farming cooperative buying Dutch semiconductor fab equipment maker.
I will not be surprised that Tencent will dump them upon first opportunity. I am almost certain that all other players on board the deal are there just to provide the justification and legal cover for otherwise nonsensical deal.
Tencent has been making strategic investments in top western gaming businesses for years. This is completely consistent with their investments in, for example, Riot and Epic. None of those have been dumped.
I think it's fair to believe that Discord can be one of two stores together with Steam. Other publishers are likely to fail.
Stores have nothing to do with "user bases." You just want people to buy stuff. As a publisher, you have all the leverage when it comes to pricing arbitrage. You can sell game X on your platform for $45 and sell the same license to Discord for $50. The consumer doesn't care where they buy it from, as long as it's cheaper. Obviously, they're incentivized to buy it on your platform.
I'm not saying that platform size doesn't matter, but funneling resources for a win there would be a Pyrrhic victory. Steam won that battle a long time ago.
But popular storefronts like Steam do have a clause that if you sell it on Steam you can't sell it for cheaper elsewhere.
Obviously a new storefront like Discord may not have that kind of power. But who knows.
My understanding is the actual rule is a bit narrower than that. You can't sell _Steam keys_ cheaper elsehwere. If you sell it as a non-Steam game they don't have any input on it.
Discords user base is traffic.
That's incredibly reductive. Not all traffic is created equally. Reddit, for example, is notorious for providing awful bang for your ad buck[1].
> Discords user base is traffic.
Oh, I see, so Facebook and Google should've started online stores because of.. traffic? Of course not. If you build a (big enough) platform for free, one of the few viable ways to monetize is to do ads. Making a store is a very dubious prospect (which has not been received particularly warmly). If you're going to bring up Steam, keep in mind they had about a decade of first mover advantage.
The equation is relatively simple. Out of everyone that visits your online store, a small % will make a purchase. You can can both optimize quality and quantity of traffic. For traffic, you need to keep it coming every day, through out the year. Discord has that returning traffic/users. Game publishers do not.
(But as I mentioned previously, and you brushed off, traffic alone is an awful metric anyway.)
It strikes me that it is easier for Discord to move into Slack's space than vice versa.
After a peek at your website, I see I'm quite a bit younger than you. I know a lot of people who do not have much money, but they still consider it worth it to spend a chunk of their limited income on Discord Nitro. In some servers I've even seen young teens (13-14) spending their allowance money on it. It would be interesting, based on your anecdote, if most Nitro subscribers are young users. It might be due to the custom emotes, which are probably more desirable to younger users than older ones.
On top of that, Discord has become the main social media platform for some people. I can't imagine using it that way myself, but I know a lot of people who are in a massive number of servers and spend much of their day on it. It's not just gaming voice chat for them, it's an entire social network. These people, who also tend to be quite young, almost always have Nitro, because it's worth paying $5-10/month for their main online platform.
Maybe the main area of concern for Discord should be whether these young users keep their subscriptions as they age.
How many too-young-to-work online gamers are there who have parents willing to pay for their subscriptions / games / in-game purchases?
We already know that these kids who don't have enough (or any of their own) money have a computer, internet access, and the ability to purchase all of the peripherals and a game needed to play. What's making companies stop and say, "We don't think the people who made these non-working kids positioned to be our customers (e.g. they have the minimum hardware needed to play their game / products) will spend any more money on them."?
Are there more kids whose parents buy them computers and allow them to play games than there are corporations / businesses?
Do all corporations / businesses and products made for corp/bus only allow for micro-transactions or are their products a monthly/yearly subscription fee (fixed rate) or is it a one time purchase?
Are we expecting future generations to stop buying computers and games for their children? Are we expecting children to stop being born or stop growing old enough to be able to use our products?
It's a demographic that's got infinite potential and every year there is a new set of customers. And, if you get on any single customer's good side they can become loyal, paying customers when they reach an age where they are no longer price-averse.
I don't know where to start searching from for this information...
Also, what we're seeing happenning in Europe right now on immigration. Japan is a bit weird right now.
Aren’t gaming computers super-high margin?
The areas usually where margins come from are:
1. Skimping on PSU quality 2. Reduced motherboard features 3. Adding LEDs as a “value add” (why earlier this year RAM with LEDs we’re going on sale ahead of the non-LED RAM)
At least, they do for the plans I'm familiar with. I don't know what Slack's giant enterprise agreements are like, but I imagine they're still getting paid plenty per-user.
I'm often surprised the type of people who are willing to pay for Nitro on Discord just for the cross-channel and animated emoticon support. I've been in communities with college students who despite posting how they're struggling to pay the rent will still keep up their Nitro subscription. The majority won't be subscribers (like most services with a free tier) but I think some underestimate those who would be, especially when targeting a mostly gaming demographic which I think has changed over the years in terms of spending habits.
I would happily pay for it, but so far it hasn’t been necessary.
Not long ago they gave me access to a huge amount of their new game library just for being a Nitro user. And they're competing with Steam by offering a better deal to publishers... which is a good thing. And of course, their voice chat is top-notch.
Bias: They're also powered by Elixir, my current favorite language.
It's especially prominent among Youtubers, and is increasingly becoming seen in some circles as a safer alternative to public forums like Reddit for topical discourse. This is, in my opinion because there's no formal discoverability mechanism, and the invite feature lets server admins make their communities as inclusive, or exclusive as they want them to be.
Discord has a lot of appeal outside of its target audience, and its growth in other areas is largely automatic since a lot of subcultures online exist in parallel or close proximity to hardcore gaming demographics.
That's where I see its future being the brightest, so long as the service doesn't get too cluttered with unnecessary 'community' features.
That's true! It's also very popular among neo nazis.
The reason discord attracts both crowds is that they can safely and easily exclude each other.
Sure, /r/the_donald is in discord and uses it to coordinate raids and harassment, but they perform those raids on Reddit and Twitter, where making a sockpuppet takes five seconds and you can instantly yell and vote at anyone on the whole site.
You can't target a discord like that, you need an invite that mods can revoke or stop issuing at any time, or use hierarchical user privileges to hinder new accounts, or any number of other moderation steps.
(I think the blog post is more popular than the startup by now!)
As for anecdata, I have yet to stumble upon any active community still using Slack in the last couple years, but I am aware of several Slack groups that cater to industry-specific demographics, though since they require membership in their particular industries I cannot speak to how active they are or whether they've since changed platforms.
I think the relevant feature differences is that Discord comes with free voice chat and free complex permission and group management features, as well as a much simpler on-boarding procedure (slack has you fiddling with accounts for each individual group).
It was something along the lines of "we take security seriously but we won't do this." IMO, it's pretty important for them to actually consider implementing this.
Maybe they want to avoid that publicity, even if it costs them some of the most paranoid users?
https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/8nzb5d/comment/...
To be honest, I agree with the people saying that this isnt discords responsibility. The real baddies are already using other services, and IIRC Discord has handed over user data for other cases as well
Which I find more convenient for small pieces of code rather than making a snippet.
In fact, Discord became the dev teams unofficial Slack backup whenever Slack went down.
Steam on the other hand will not retain more than 5ish of the last messages.
I'd say it's fine aslong as users could set a duration for their messages automatically, but Discord doesn't even have a mass deletion option. Their API has been Incapable of mass deletion further than 2 weeks.
I have no doubt there will be some major leaks in the future that ruin someone's life.
Source - know owner of said support tool software.
1. If you close a private message window and are not friends with the person or share a server with them, there is no way to open it again, so you've lost access to that chat history and can't delete your messages from there.
2. If you get banned from a server, you lose access to that server's history and can't delete your messages from it.
3. If you delete your account, your messages are not deleted and stay in all private conversations and servers forever.
Their data management is simply terrible. Personally, I would've deleted my account already, but I don't feel comfortable knowing I can't delete my past messages and that they may add that option later.
If every user you sent a message to had a copy of your message would you expect those to be deleted as well? Isn't that the recipient's data?
Assuming you answered no is there a material difference when you store a single copy and do reference counting?
Discord's UI might be lacking but allowing you to delete messages authored by you but ownwed by another is already pretty privacy oriented.
They're absolutely the community chat tool of choice these days - just about every subreddit you go to, every fandom you could ever think of, has a discord community. It's incredibly easy to put one together.
But things like Nitro seem to have minimal adoption. The game store isn't particularly compelling. They've got some partnerships with games where they offer Discord up as the actual in-game voice communication, but I haven't seen much adoption of that, and I don't know if it actually results in revenue for them, either.
It's not unique - we've seen plenty of major tech companies in similar spots - but they've basically all pivoted to advertisements as a way to make money, something that Discord has categorically said they don't want to do. I don't know what they could do to really turn things around here.
Genuinely curious, as all over this thread there's people saying "so many people have Nitro!" and other saying "no one pays for Nitro"..
I'd love to see stats to figure out who is actually correct.
We're the demographics that, at least to me, seem the most likely to pay for it as well. Better than average incomes, MMO subscribers, groups that host their own servers for games that support it, subscribers to twitch streamers, etc. I can't fathom who is paying for Nitro in large numbers if not these demographics.
I wish them the best, it would suck if Discord disappeared, but they're throwing a lot stones into the gaming well. And we all know how the gaming world is...
Worth $1.65B April 19th, worth $1.85B December 19th (+$150MM in new money, for a post-money of $2B ignoring rounding, options pool expanding and preferences).
So their value grew ~12% in 8 months.
I wonder what's in store for Discord next. Integration into games? Digital currencies blending the virtual worlds with reality?
They're launching a full self-service game publishing platform and only taking 10% revenue, instead of Steam's 30%. Discord already has the gaming focused community and their store has already been doing very well and is super easy to use. If Discord broke into the streaming market there would be no reason to ever leave it for some people. Buy your game, talk to friends and join their games, watch streamed games - all from one client.
Discord does already have some integration into games with the rich presence stuff and some games you can even jump into from a chat. The overlay also works like as if it's chat within a game.
I love Discord though, and I generally agree with your analysis.
This never occurred to me before. When you put it like that it really does make me think they could be an extremely strong rival to Steam.
I buy quite a few games, but can't see a compelling reason to buy anything from Discord. I also don't know anyone else that's bought a game from them yet either.
I find it awfully odd to use the word "surpassing" to describe valuation, given that valuation is a number on paper. "Surpassing" is for something where there were expectations to exceed; or an arduous challenge overcome to the surprise of onlookers.
Valuation is an expectation; by definition it cannot be exceeded. While running a company is surely arduous, the most interesting challenge and the place to surpass expectations is not in the board room where the valuation is decided; and whether the math is massaged to offer a valuation a few decimal digits above or below a nice round $2B is more a foible of those in the room than any real indication of... anything.
Odd phrasing, to say "surpassing" here. It's numeric assignment.
Troll: "Whats your age?" Me: "9"
Troll reports messages to Discord after completing the baiting technique (clearly has done this before to other people.)
Discord immediately disables my account despite the fact that I 1) paid for Nitro with a credit card in my name and have an ongoing subscription to Nitro 2) Entered my birthdate/age as nearly 30 in my original registration.
Screenshots of everything including the messages that Discord banned me over:
http://imgur.com/gallery/EmpKpke
This company does not deserve our business. While banned I had no access to any of my private chat logs and the servers I run were in jeopardy of being lost.
Even though they eventually unbanned me, their last email wuite clearly demonstrates how ridiculous their procedures are: "Never joke about being under the age of 13 [even in private messages.]" They try to back up their bullshit by mentioning it is a because of COPPA. Reminiscent of Slack banning all non US ips because of supposed "embargo laws."
I would love if a lawyer could chime in like in the Slack thread and show how lazy anf customer hostile their procedures are.
We need to quit using these centralized services. They clearly do not care about you or me as free speaking individuals or even as customers. They are just looking for the next IPO or funding round. The actual revenue we provide to them? Shoe gum.
No one in that support org is going to go cross-reference your account details and look that stuff up because (1) they hopefully don't have access to it and (2) no offence, you're not important enough to get some kind of special treatment.
Your expectations that a company with millions of customers should "get the joke" or spend time triple-checking whether you were serious or not are unrealistic.
That's just the reality of moderation services at scale in today's Internet. No one does it in-house anymore, so it's all very very black-and-white when it comes to enforcement.
You will be banned/removed.
[0]: https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b
Unless you consider taking VC captial "making money"
Slack makes good money.
Do I use either service?
Not often, but I have accounts. When I reconnect to my gamer friends / clicks they all use these services.
I have not felt compelled (peer pressure) to create accounts on any cloud provider in a long time. Both got me to sign up.
I think someone could make a performance art piece about scrolling throught the ebay ad choices: that was a quiet half an hour spent contemplating the online ad industry.
Anyone who can come with a tool that makes communications marginally more effective has come up with a tool that has great value.
What you are missing is the part where messaging is a solved problem.
We've come far from telegraph and fax machines, but still have a long way to go.
I invest $10 in a lemonade stand and get 10% equity in the company. That means that I can theoretically buy the company at $100 to get 100% of the equity.
So when investors put $150M into a company, they are purchasing equity/stock/shares/whatever and the company can then be valued based on the percentage of equity they get for their investment.