This worries me a bit. At the moment they are providing the software and hosting it all absolutely free.

I would happily still use Discord if they provided the exact same thing with a monthly fee. Hopefully at some point they throw in some extra features for a pro version and start charging.

I just use Discord for gaming and haven't used Slack a lot, but I think Discord will be great for work as soon as they release search.

I don't know. I use Slack and Discord a lot. The only advantage Discord has going for it is the voice chat channels, which has much more utility for gaming than business in my opinion. Otherwise Slack is way better at all the other features and I usually feel neutered when I'm using Discord after using Slack all day.

Realistically, the plan is probably getting acquired by something like Youtube Gaming or Twitch to be part of the platform.

They're targetting the Twitch model a bit with customizable bits for a charge. Basically allowing some chat branding for guilds and the like.

If they need ideas for a pro version I'd probably pay far too much to be able to record each user into individual audio files (recorded locally to each user and combined on my system) for podcasts, letsplays (YouTube videos), remote meetings, etc

This is doable today. Streams are mixed client-side. The downsides are compression (Opus at 96kbps is pretty good, though) and loss of audio mixing (echo cancellation, noise suppression) secret sauce, though this could definitely be reapplied. If this is worth money to you even with these downsides, hit me up.

> Discord is always completely free to use with no gotchas. This means you can make as many servers as you want with no slot limitations. Wondering how we’ll make money? In the future there will be optional cosmetics like themes, sticker packs, and sound packs available for purchase. We’ll never charge for Discord’s core functionality. [0]

[0]: www.discordapp.com

Something smells very fishy there. I have a hard time believing they got a $30 million investment by pitching stickers, add-on themes, and sound effects...

They already offer a VoIP platform for existing game studios to integrate (think built in voice chat per team with positional audio SDK)

Isn't that the core functionality that they say they won't charge for?

If not, I don't understand why they bothered mentioning "how will we make money?" on their website, and then why they didn't answer with, "By charging game vendors a ton of money for the SDK!"

What's the point? Tons of game engines already offer that in-engine, eliminating the need for Discord's ability to do that. (It's been around since UT2K3 earliest I can remember.)

People really love using discord and a lot of games/platforms implement voip very very poorly. Have you tried using steam voip?

No, I haven't tried steam VoIP because as mentioned, the game engine itself usually comes with a working and tested solution, so why bother using any other VoIP application that's just wasting RAM and CPU cycles trying to do the same thing in a far larger footprint?

In the case of Overwatch you can group up with friends outside the game and share your own voice channel with each other, but when you join a competitive match you have to choose between group chat and team chat, and most people expect you to join team chat.

In other words, if you and one friend join a game you can either talk/listen to that one friend alone or the entire 6 man team, and switching between the two requires multiple menu clicks.

So we use Teamspeak alongside the game to allow us to talk privately with each other seprate from the whole team in game. With any modern gaming PC the "wasted RAM and CPU cycles" are negligible.

The sticker model can be quite successful: http://qz.com/704768/line-sold-268-million-worth-of-stickers...

Stickers are more than something to sell to consumers - They can be advertisements used to target a gaming audience. Skype and Facebook have done this, offering free sticker packs for upcoming movies (e.g. Inside Out). A pack of stickers or a theme featuring characters from a game like Overwatch could potentially bring in revenue from both Blizzard and players.

They have an awful lot of information about video gamers in conversation history. They could mine that data for game companies and sell it as a way to help companies build better, more addictive and mechanically pleasing games.

I'm not sure how useful that is. It's not like gamers' opinion about games are hard to come by. Gamers are very vocal about their opinions, so any game developer looking for feedback can just go to Steam/Reddit/NeoGAF/whatever and read to their heart's content, or maybe even communicate directly to their player base.

What people say/believe they like isn't necessarily consistent with their behavior. Data-mining with sentiment analysis might be useful. ("'Wows' dropped 1.3% and negative-sentiment profanity rose 0.5% after the latest patch.")

We've adamantly stated many a time that we will never sell users data, or put ads in the app.

Isn't it a little irresponsible to make that claim while operating on VC funding with no monetization strategy?

I don't mean to imply that you yourself are being dishonest or that you will go back on your word at some point. I'm sure you have noble intentions and want the best for your users. But it might be beyond your control.

If the company gets sold or goes public, you could have drastic changes in management and their philosophy. You acknowledge this outright in your privacy page, under the "OUR DISCLOSURE OF YOUR INFORMATION" heading:

https://discordapp.com/privacy

Discord has a policy in place that explicitly says they can do whatever they want with the information without limit, including selling it or transferring it without consent. This directly conflicts with employees' public claims about intentions.

The difference is that one of them is a legal acknowledgement end users must make before they use the software and the other is a 'feel good' thing to hear on someone's blog or forum post.

If they just wanted protection against an accidental slippage of data then that privacy page could be changed substantially. Instead, they pave the road for the explicit sale of data at a later time.

Or, if they wanted to leave the option open in the future they could say "This privacy policy is subject to change" and give users an opportunity to opt-out when it changes without historical data being subject to undisclosed future use. But this weakens their value in an eventual acquisition by someone who wants to monetize the data.

As it stands right now, in an eventual acquisition or even just some internal shifts of philosophy in the organization, all historical data is up for grabs for any potential use.

Discord really shouldn't have employees state that they will never sell users data when they explicitly allow and plan for that option. It may not be intentional dishonesty, but it comes close.

"The difference is that one of them is a legal acknowledgement end users must make before they use the software and the other is a 'feel good' thing to hear on someone's blog or forum post."

No, if it's from a known employee, it counts as a legal advertisement.

Only if that employee is a VP or above AIUI.

You have Tencent as an investor. I've dealt with them when I've done work in China. I can't trust this statement knowing how that company operates.

Would you be so kind as to elaborate?

Tencent demands way too much for what they pay. Even when it comes to consultants and our already-exorbitant pricing. They may not say it immediately, but it is coming.

>put ads in the app.

How about if streamers wanted to put ads in their channel, and the company would take a little handling fee? eh?

"Support this other streamer/studio/client, subscribe to remove ads"

As does every other company in your position, then they sell the data. Every time.

Pure opinion:

> mine that data [...] more addictive [...] games

Oh, fuck no. No, no, no. I can not think of a more abusive thing for a company to do to its customers than that suggestion right there. How little respect would a company have for their fellow humans that anyone could even consider such a move?

Maybe that's just a failure of imagination on my part, but I'm ok with that.

if that kind of information had any value whatsoever, Reddit would be worth billions

Aggregated or Non-identifiable Data: We may also share aggregated or non-personally identifiable information with our partners or others for business purposes.

They're also free international. I bet plenty of governments would pay for a steady feed.

Serious Answer: To Kill IRC for a whole generation

I thought that was Slack's plan.

It is, but slack seemed to go for a more corporate angle (along with Microsoft Teams), and there's not really anything for more casual users. On the other end of the scale we have Skype but that's more for personal chatting and their group conversation support is very week.

They have found a pretty good niche with a lot of users. Just like how reddit did with subreddits. There are a lot of "smallish" communities out there, based around games, likes, twitch/youtube channels, etc, and they all need some place to hang out when they're not in saig game/channel.

I think right now what matters most is who comes out winner with the biggest community, monitezation can come later.

It is bizzare to me that Google's hangouts product didn't end up filling this niche. I cannot understand why they followed FB lead instead of working to dismantle the attraction of closed messaging systems. Topical group chat seems like it would just naturally fall out of circles, hangouts, and wave.

Discord is targeting the gaming community, though it can also be used as an alternative to Slack, which is, for example, what the devs behind Yarn (https://yarnpkg.com) use it for: https://discordapp.com/invite/yarnpkg

One can't organize a Slack server for free (at least without funny hacks via github), so that won't happen.

> Slack's plan.

Destroy IRC

Wow, someone has no freaking sense of humor.

Getting flagged for a Danger 5 quote? Someone just lost all their nerd cred.

You didn't answer the question. How does that make money? If it's about killing IRC, who's paying for that?

I sure hope one possible end-game is to re-skin it without the gaming focus and price it competitively to Hipchat/Slack.

As soon as screensharing lands it'll be an across the board upgrade to Hipchat at my work (only missing feature I can think of is video calls, but quality over hipchat has always been a bit sketchy so we usually fall back to Hangouts).

probably also working on a premium service with a monthly charge to go along with the free tier

They're in the gaming market, there's cash plenty. Even if they just went the advertisement route, which I doubt they will they should end up doing well.