I somewhat dread hearing an open source project does support in Discord but sometime I’ve had it work out for me.
As for gaming it was a while ago so I’m not quite able to give a breakdown feature by feature why Discord was better than the communication tools in LoL and it might have been more the social selection effect. Play unranked and you can spend forever in the queue because three people show up and they all want to play top or nobody wants to jungle (I learned how to jungle pretty quick so I could avoid that one.). Play ranked and you find a lot of people who think they can’t get ahead because they get matched with losers, starting with the jungler.
Just getting a bunch of people with a P.M.A. and giving them cohesion means you will have more fun and play better.
So I think it is a people problem. Imagine a social network for an extended family or a ham radio club or something that has maybe 30 people in it. No way you can get my mother-in-law to pay for it or individual cheap-ass hams but I might pay for my whole group or the club can find $30 a month out of its budget.
I think of a wedding where you meet a lot of people you don’t know but what if you knew a little more about who you were going to meet and had some tools that were aimed at you developing a more permanent connection with just two of the cool people you meet. The wedding has a stupendous budget but a tiny extra spend on the right social tools could multiply the social benefit it has.
That’s the way to think about it. Discord has shown you can get one person to pay for all the users of a small social network, it is the business model that impresses me more than the product itself.