The popular social platform Discord, originally designed as a major virtual hangout for gamers, has now grown into something much wider in scope. Now, the platform is moving away from its focus on gaming. As Discord members are now changing, it makes some notable changes and moves towards being more inclusive.
Since its inception, Discord has been a mainstay of the community of gamers. Although not changing their name, they are rebranding away from being an application that was once dedicated to helping gamers and gaming-fans communicate with each other during matches.
Discord has more than 100 million monthly active users that spend about four billion minutes conversing with each other via text, audio, image, and video across a whopping 6.7 million active servers.
Discord is Now A Place for Everyone to Talk
Discord announced this major step towards rebranding on June 30th to the chatting platform on their blog. According to the founder and CEO of Discord, Jason Citron, Discord is leaving behind their old branding and adopting a new tagline, which is “Your Place to Talk.”
In the blog, Jason said that they are doing so to reflect their increasingly broad audience and their needs. He said that he wants Discord to be more inclusive, welcoming, and trustworthy so various communities from all around the globe can find a home here.
In short, the founder wants the platform to be for ‘literally everyone’ or for ‘anyone who likes to talk to others’ instead of just ‘gaming-centric.’
To make Discord more user-friendly and accessible, Jason said that he has streamlined the onboarding experience for all the new users and made it easier for them to create fresh templates. Moreover, the Discord team has also worked on fixing various bugs and making its in-app communication less centered on gaming.
In their blog post, they also mentioned getting “$100 million in additional funding.” Before this, the most recent funding resulted in a $150 million spike at a $2 billion valuation. This milestone was achieved by Discord back in 2018 when they were experimenting with their own digital storefront for gamers. A lot has changed since then due to the Pandemic. Now, the number of active users on the platform has been increased by a whopping 50% in the USA. Furthermore, the number is doubled in France and Spain while it has been tripled in Italy.
We can easily say that the company now has a much higher valuation. This also means that the investors, including Riot Games owner Tencent, now expect much more from the platform. Therefore, the platform now needs to deliver a greater return on investment to its investors and owners. And, to do so, Discord needs to break into the mainstream.
Improving User Security and Other Features
To make Discord more inclusive for all its users and reach a wider audience, they are improving its security and boosting its existing features. For instance, they have increased their voice and video capacity by 200 percent.
The platform is dedicated to making all its communities feel safe and bringing down the banhammer on those who want to use Discord to harm others – be it racists, supremacists, or anyone who wants to use the platform for evil.
All in all, a lot of interesting stuff is expected to be coming out of these rebranding efforts, and we are keeping an eye on them to see how they transform themselves into the mainstream.