I'm not familiar with it, so how is discord a competitor to twitch? It looks like a newer TeamSpeak to me.

Think of Discord as like TeamSpeak and Slack combined. Streamers use Discord as a place to house their viewers and community when they're not streaming. Having a TwitchChat outside of TwitchChat is actually pretty powerful for streamers and a potentially crucial part of their setup. Twitch needed to invest in something like that.

Are streamers hosting their chats on Discord as opposed to Twitch's chat system, which tends to break down after a certain level of activity?

Only thing I can think of.

Full Disclosure: I really like Discord, and use Twitch daily.

Discord has more easily manageable chat roles, eg: Moderator, Helper, Regular, Supporter, etc. Twitch chat is nothing more than simple IRC, and relies almost entirely on bots for the more complicated stuff. Discord also has voice chat built in, whereas Twitch has none for their chatters.

Discord also has a better documented API and libraries in a lot of languages. Overall, Discord (despite using an electron app...) is simply a better chatting product.

"despite being an electron app", I'm way happier using Discord than I am using either Hipchat or Skype.

Discord is a really well-put-together app, has text and voice chat that do their jobs, and get out of the way. The only complaint I have is that there's little to no support for searching history, but for an app focusing on live "community" chats, that seems a reasonable compromise.

I don't like browser based desktop apps. They have all the disadvantages of native apps but lose most advantages of HTML5 apps by being platform specific (apparently these is no discord desktop for linux) and require you to download an entire browser engine along with your app. You have to install them as opposed to just visiting an URL. They are not as lightweight as conventional desktop applications and don't perform as well. I'd rather see the browser getting more powerful. The cat is out of the bag already. If they're going to use a browser anyway, why can't they just run in my browser of choice along with all the other websites?

> apparently these is no discord desktop for linux

The Discord developers are working on this. It's not just web components but also native dependencies as well, so it's understandable I think if the Linux version comes in a little bit behind macOS and Windows versions where the majority of the gamer market is.

Next up, I'm starting to like when companies use desktop HTML5 apps. HTML and JavaScript does enable developers to move quickly with their interfaces, and I find them to be generally much more well-kept than native counterparts, where there's more inertia in making interface changes. A good comparison gamers will be familiar with is Steam. The Steam UI is written in a valve-proprietary, CSS-like language that I imagine is less performant than CSS. It's also REALLY buggy, so much so that I'm surprised that Valve has not already moved to an Electron app for Steam. If they did they'd be able to iterate quickly on interface improvements which they certainly don't do now.

Disclosure: I'm a Discord developer.

Discord works in a browser or with the native apps. Just visit the website and click 'Open Discord in your browser'

I'm on the same boat, the only complaint being the lack of history search. And I like Discord so much that I switched our office from Hipchat to Discord, despite it being exclusively marketed towards gamers.

We have been completely happy with the switch, in special the ability to hop into voice chat with remote coworkers with one mouse click.

(Discord Dev here) Awesome to hear Discords a good fit for workplace environments too, we've heard a couple success stories around remote teams swapping. Search is a huge priority for us, but its also something we wanna spend time getting right. e.g. soon!

I haven't used Discord but if it's better than Slack you are sitting on a huge opportunity. I know your focus is gamers but the market Slack is targeting is huge. Their mobile app is garbage (at least on android). Always 'reconnecting'. Doesn't keep the recent chats offline and has to always fetch it from server. Missing/delayed notifications. Desktop app on OS X is better but it too has 'connection issues'.

It looks like we will be able to use Discord when you add search. Seriously, tell the management to think about it being an alternative to Slack. We are a paying Slack customer and while they are better than hipchat/IRC, it is far from perfect.

I've said it before and I'll say it a thousand times more, a 'business-oriented' rebrand of discord (basically ditch all the gamery shit and allow people to host their own servers on their own hardware) would basically be pure profit.

This is a long shot, but if you could sign a HIPPA waver, I could convince the bureaucrats at my workplace to jump in.

Drop me a line (andrei @ discordapp.com) and I'll at least take a look.

Ditto to this!

Remote startup checking in here - we're in the gaming industry and Discord has been a perfect fit for us. We love it.

Our top "wanted" features right now are video chat/screenshare, so that we can drop Hangouts entirely, and search. We wish we could pay you guys. Seriously.

I stated that transparently just to say that it was one, not that it isn't a well done one. I actually am running a Canary build for Linux of Discord and have had almost no issues with it, and any problems have been fixed very transparently.

Discord is also arguably a better implementation for team chat than Slack. Being able to jump in a room and have audio session out of the box alone is huge advantage compared to Slack.

I'm pretty sure that's a feature in slack, used it just yesterday actually

Discord is by far the best communication app I've used. For chat and for voice.

> Discord also has a better documented API and libraries in a lot of languages. Overall, Discord (despite using an electron app...) is simply a better chatting product.

Better documented APIs and libraries than IRC? That’s not just quite a stretch, it’s literally a lie.

There’s IRC libs in every language you can imagine, usually dozens per language, with many perfectly documented ones, for every possible purpose.

And about all of them work for Twitch chat.

IRC libraries are often gnarly and quirky at the best of times, and Twitch isn't all that close to standard IRC and never has been (plus, they've changed their proprietary extensions in non-backwards-compatible ways from time to time).

Twitch has been trying to hire front end devs and they're failing at hosting anything more than a video stream. They should have acquired discord, but instead the two failing companies curse and twitch are teaming up

Can you expand upon the "failing" nature of these companies? On first sniff, I'm catching the same scent that rises from the last several decades of people proclaiming Microsoft is on the way out.

Twitch won the war of becoming the go to video game streaming app, but didn't do so by being a great innovator. It just got there first and now is a monopoly due to it having all the audience. Discord is clearly a passionate endeavor made by gamers. They may have a way of really changing the video game streaming business if they would be willing.

Requiring flash for streaming in this day and age is unforgivable.

Twitch at least "won out" over competitors by just being the least terrible streaming site for the most part. Now it's gliding along purely on inertia. They haven't innovated or brought anything important to the table, they're just the biggest player at that table

Curse I'm admittedly more than slightly biased on, since I used it basically from its inception back in the World of Warcraft days, because that's all it was initially

Curse was the least awful way to manage a bucket load of WoW addons, almost like how there are package managers for Linux today. It simply provided some central place to manage and keep mods updated, especially ones that would break whenever Blizzard patched it

Curse at least, slowly evolved into this hydra-like monster, trying to split itself off into as many different things as it could. The most insidious one I remember was when I reinstalled it (for trying out the newest World of Warcraft expansion at the time) it'd evolved far beyond what I expected

Upon relaunching my system it prompted me to add literally every friend I had across Skype, Steam and League of Legends. While also overlaying its voice chat system when playing certain games (League and TF2 come to mind)

Keep in mind I never used any of these features, it was simply new garbage that Curse added to try and stay "relevant"

TDLR The site is riddled with glitches and they've done the bare minimum with their pipeline. They literally cannot fix their chat system, but somehow their video streaming works? That's like the first thing you learn how to make using JavaScript.. I feel like they have so little to offer, it's only a matter of time before gamer, tech-savvy, word of mouth, linking type of people use another platform where browsing for channels is easy, there are featured streams, aggregate streams, non-gaming streams, forums, profiles, private messages, and all the normal stuff you see on a website nowadays. Hacker news is yet another example of a bad front-end. Amazon and facebook are bloated, and soundcloud is in the same boat too, they literally just cannot realize what users want, and at this point the higher-ups will only focus on squeezing revenue out while the app is still relevant. Lost all startup mentality before they actually made something great. Sure it's viral but so is the "blue or yellow dress" and tons of other bs

It looks like they do have "whispering" but I still literally cannot browse the site without it crashing. I feel like users are just abusing the free bandwidth and hosting capability, similar to soundcloud and youtube

I am amazed Discord itself has not been acquired yet. It looks like it was effectively designed to be acquired. They have no functional business, and have to be in the market. I've commented before I expected someone like Twitch to pick them up. Maybe Twitch didn't like the price?

I actually disagree that Discord doesn't have a functional business. They have massive growth and many many top teams, streamer personalities etc use their services.

If Discord becomes a critical component to the content creators of the whole gaming ecosystem, there's going to be plenty of revenue opportunities.

As I just said, and you confirmed: Discord doesn't have a functional business. Discord currently makes no money. "Opportunites" are just that, opportunities. A lottery ticket is an opportunity, but it is not a business.

Discord promises it will always be free with "no gotchas". It specifically notes no "slot limitations" as an example of that, which indicates premium tiers are unlikely. They promise to never charge for core functionality. Presumably they may be able to do some sponsored promotion of some sort, but banner ads are probably out.

The revenue plan they mention is here: "In the future there will be optional cosmetics like themes, sticker packs, and sound packs available for purchase." And I have not ever seen an emoji pack for a chat service as an appealing sales item that's going to fund a startup. I'm super skeptical of this, and it's why I don't use it.

But, it'd make a solid acquisition for a company like Twitch that has a shoddy/simple chat function and needs something better in the gaming space.

LINE made $268 Million from just stickers last year http://qz.com/704768/line-sold-268-million-worth-of-stickers...

If Discord can keep up the growth, things like stickers, emojis, and sound packs could pull in good revenue. Also, the gaming community is already used to paying for these items on sites like Twitch

I will stand corrected, with this excellent example.

God, I'm so disconnected with current millennial trends, I had to lookup what those stickers were.

I'm a millennial and haven't heard of them until now.

Everyone likes to keep coming up with new names for the word "emote".

I'm actually a millennial too, I just don't give a damn about all these new apps that are reinventing irc for the tap/swipe people.

I have to admit, Slack and Discord are much nicer to use than IRC - even something like IRCCloud (and I'm a relatively happy paying customer of IRCCloud).

It's probably due to location. LINE is absolutely dominant in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and a few other Asian markets. None of my friends in America use it really. Facebook messenger is clearly watching LINE closely though.

>Also, the gaming community is already used to paying for these items on sites like Twitch

But I have a "global twitch emote" plugin on chrome so I presume kappa will already show up for me if used in discord?

Why would a chrome plugin affect a totally separate application?

It's not really totally separate. Discord is a web app and you can run it in chrome. The only feature that you lose is push-to-talk, last I looked.

Granted, a lot of people will run the electron-based desktop app (which packages the web site), but IIRC, there's a plugin for twitch emotes for it too.

> And I have not ever seen an emoji pack for a chat service as an appealing sales item that's going to fund a startup.

You underestimate gamers as a market. Valve's built a thriving business on virtual hats. Twitch sells access to premium emotes and a wider range of username colors as a subscription upgrade. "Cosmetic purchases" are huge.

Discord could also do what Twitch does and let streamers offer recurring donation options to their fanbases, in exchange for perks like being able to talk during restricted times (eg. during large streams) and custom community-specific stickers.

I'm not that sure about Valve. What they actually have for hats now is a system that withdrawals short of casino — you can't buy the thing you want, instead, you buy a "crate" that may (randomly) contain it, or other item.

My thinking is that hats aren't that profitable without these kinds of tricks, and Steam effectively sponsored everything that happened at Valve before they implemented "gambling".

I get where you're coming from, but this is definitely not the case. Valve recently banned all gambling sites from using their APIs, so they're all shut down by now.

And if you refer to crates of random items as gambling, they've also filled in that gap with the Steam Marketplace where you can buy individual items for market-dictated prices from other Steam users, where Valve takes a portion of the money the items are sold for.

This business is extremely profitable. Looking at their game Dota 2 for example where they recently hosted the world's largest e-sports tournament, where the pricepool were completely funded by the players of Dota 2 through in-game virtual items. This pricepool were over $20,000,000 USD, funded through in-game purchases where 25% of the items price would go to the pricepool, and the rest would go to Valve. That is $60,000,000 USD that Valve profited in the span of two months, for one of their games, in one of their tournaments. Valve hosts 4 tournaments per year for this game.

Looking at the pricepool of their previous tournaments ( http://www.esportsearnings.com/tournaments ), we can see that this amount just keeps increasing year after year.

My point is that what Valve does with in-game items is similar to what certain mobile games do with time/pay-walls and how casinos exploit certain aspects of our psychology. And if you do not practice this "shady stuff", it is not that profitable…

# Crates

Crates or doubling, tripling, etc. item's cost. Say I want a certain hat, on average, I'll need to pay multiple times (crate contains 5 other items, but successive crates do not yield duplicates in most recent Dota 2 versions, so worst case you pay 6 times a price).

# Steam Marketplace

Adds at least 30% to item's cost, since you buy with real-world dollars, but sell for "Valve Dollars" (only usable in Steam, no withdrawals), this is effectively paying more for a single item (at least 30% more expensive which is Valve's margin for Steam purchases of non-Valve titles).

In addition, Valve makes purchases non-tradable via Marketplace for a period of time (multiple months, usually) since original purchases for "preventing fraud". I see it as "incentivising gambling with crates", though.

# Third-party site

These were probably shut down because they involved real money, so Vavle could be potentially helping organise casino/bookmaking businesses from legal standpoint. It's all fine with Steam Money from marketplace.

So, yes, it is extremely profitable, probably orders of magnitude more profitable than "honest" selling where transaction is "pay money, receive item".

# Regarding TI

It is incredible how much money it made. It is as incredible as how Valve decided to split matchmaking pool for months with International Ranked to boost prize pool, so you had to pay $10 to go into faster queue.

You do realise it is completely backwards, right? The crates were first to arrive, only after that the real money market came along. Sure, the boxes themselves were a little scammy, but it was not like it meant anything gameplay wise, unlike most of in-game purchases ever - where you have to continually feed money to be able to keep up

Not sure what you mean by "real money market", Steam Community Market? Or ability to put in money for creates in TF2? Because in TF2 you first would randomly receive items for just playing or achieving certain goals. Then they added creates which would also randomly drop and you'd need to buy a key to unlock some random stuff inside. Not sure on current situation, haven't played for years now.

In the beginning of Dota 2, you were able to buy item directly, now you either need to go to Commumity Market, or buy crates from Valve. Check out dota2.com/store — there is either half a year old sets, or crates for new ones. Even older items are not in the shop and I believe w/ever you unlock from crates is not tradable for quite some time.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there seems to be no way to buy particular items directly, at least not newer ones. (Exceptions are $30+ arcana quality sets which bring a lot of money as they are, so no need to increase price with "gambling".)

You can generally buy the majority of items you want directly and it's often actually cheaper than buying 200 crates to get some item with a 0.5% chance.

Check out TI treasures. There are only crates. No?

You should check out LINE. Same business model, absolutely huge.

I guess I don't know what you mean by functional business. For me they have built an incredibly valuable asset that has grown enormously and will probably continue to do so.

Amazon is another company with opportunities to make profit, but they traditionally haven't done much of that, eschewing that for just growing value.

In the years when Amazon was not turning profit, would you consider it a non-functional business?

I don't see how they're going to extract enough revenue to keep the lights on and pay the staff. This isn't the same as Amazon reinvesting money that would otherwise be profits.