Well known to gamers, the Discord platform has come a long way. Launched in 2015, the company founded by Jason Citron has revolutionized the way gamers communicate, both in part and in their everyday lives. Initially conceived as a messaging application for keyboard/mouse fans (or controllers, we're not judging anyone), Discord is now much more popular than you might think, and in fields as diverse as they are varied.
With its 150 million users connected each month, the platform has expanded its territory both virtually and physically. So much so that France has made a place of choice for itself on the American network, having one of the largest international markets on its own. This is why the firm intends to consolidate its relations with the French public who have managed to exploit the platform in the best possible way.
The community at the heart of the project
During an evening of appreciation of its community, or rather its communities, Discord discovered the diversity that was at stake on French territory, within the application itself. Jesse Wofford, the director of product marketing for communities and creators, personally explained to us that beyond gaming, users have managed to appropriate the messaging service in order to create all kinds of communities, around fitness (L’école du tigre), art (Creative Arts) or even George Lucas films (Planète Star Wars).
All created by French people, these servers have thousands of members who bring together all the players around the subjects that are important to them. And that is precisely the goal of the company, which wants to strengthen these already well-established links. To do this, Discord has already deployed a number of tools that allow all users to enjoy the platform in the best possible way.
We are thinking in particular of the different channels and servers, whether voice or text, the creation of forums, which allow to centralize discussions on specific and one-off themes, or even Stage Channels, which allow to organize large-scale conferences without going through the stress of an overloaded voice channel.
As for moderation, always very important when it comes to cybersecurity, Discord has always known how to work hand in hand with its community, counting on developers and their bots to govern a good part of their servers. Of course, if each creator can choose to put their own rules in force in their space, the firm is responsible for enforcing its basic principles thanks to universal tools that greatly facilitate the work of budding developers.
We are thinking in particular of AutoMod, which allows among other things to automatically filter certain keywords (insults, racist, homophobic, sexist insults, etc.) present in messages before they are even published. As they say, prevention is better than cure. A tool that is both useful and promising, recently implemented on the network, which will undoubtedly be extremely useful in a still very toxic field: video games.
Discord on your consoles, soon to be a reality
A true spearhead of the company, and first target audience, gamers are today present at 33% on the platform. The remaining 67% are servers dedicated to all sorts of subjects. This is still a good third of Discord's audience, who enjoy communicating, sharing information, helping each other, coaching each other, or streaming, or all of these at the same time.
The company does not intend to abandon this part of its audience and continues its efforts to make Discord a reference on PC but also on consoles. Recently, we learned of the official integration of the platform on Xbox, which does not yet take the form of a dedicated and complete application but which allows you to use voice functions (calls and channels) directly on your console.
On PlayStation too, we are eagerly awaiting the native integration of a Discord application, which we have no news about yet. This should not be long, however, as the company is investing more and more in its international markets – the first European offices have just opened – and is announcing some new features for the coming months. We do not know them in detail, but know that the brand plans to invest in French students by the end of the year, and join the benches of Paris Games Week from November 2 to 6.
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