Discord has ditched their gaming focus to better reflect their more diverse user base. This comes after they reached out to their community and asked what makes them choose Discord over other services. Turns out, it wasn't just the gaming.
Discord launched back in 2015 as a platform for gamers to communicate and congregate around their hobby. It has marketed itself this way ever since, and even the loading screen of the app has been full of gaming jokes. That longtime marketing approach and Discord's consistent reliability helped it overtake apps like Skype to become the new center of gaming voice chat. Since then, the app has changed somewhat, adding and abandoning the ability to launch games from within the service and link with other games services like Steam, but all those changes have been based on meeting the perceived needs of gamers, specifically. This latest change will now tend to the needs of everyone else.
This update is explained by both an official Discord Medium post and YouTube trailer. The new tagline of Discord is "Your place to talk" to better reflect the wide variety of topics that Discord servers are, well, talking about. Other big additions coming in this update are server video chat, server templates, and making it easier to invite outside users into Discord communities. A huge part of this rebranding is opening up the service to those who might have not used it because of the gaming focus but were still interested in its open message board style of communication. Discord also reconfirms that their first priority is still reliability and performance, and, in line with that, they have increased voice and video capacity by 200 percent.
The platform also recently launched its Safety Center feature, which helps people set up their account so that they are protected from a several security threats. It also leads to the community guidelines which detail what Discord will and will not tolerate on their platform with potential consequences for breaking those guidelines. The blog post also includes a statement warning against white supremacists and "any others who seek to use Discord for evil." A key part of their step towards inclusivity is to make sure that their communities are safe from intrusion by hateful rule-breakers, so one of the few things that won't be tolerated on Discord is intolerance.
In all, Discord and its users have needed this change for a while, as the narrow focus of gaming has really limited how Discord can grow its userbase. If they had made this change a little sooner, they very well could have been the go-to app for meeting and conducting business during the COVID-19 crisis that Zoom is. It's also admirable that Discord is being clear in their growth statement that, while it's "Your place to talk," it's firmly established as no place to hate or spread hate. If the platform takes actual action against those spreading hate like they say they will, then they will already be ahead of social media giants Twitter and Facebook.
Source: Discord, Discord/YouTube