Discord is as valuable to the gaming community as IRC was, or as Ventrilo was, or as Skype was (for a while). In other words, not very (as all those tools were easily replaced). Twitch built a marketplace of creators and consumers (like YouTube) -- that's why it's hard to replace. Discord, on the other hand, is a chat program.

I disagree (to a degree). Everyone i know kicked and screamed about switching from Vent/Teamspeak/Mumble. I feel like it eventually dominated not because it was easy to dump existing solutions, but because existing solutions were poorly designed by comparison. No mobile, horrid chat, required install, poor voip quality. Discord came along with a better offering and it still was a tough switch.

With that said, i agree that no one "cares" about Discord. If a better thing comes along i could easily see people dumping it. But, i imagine it'll be a bit more difficult. Discord "won" in my view because it simply had to be modern to be vastly superior. However, i'm unsure how easy someone can make a next version that is such a superior leap.

Fwiw, as a gaming voip/chat i still find it a pretty great UX. My only complaint is that it is a bit laggy due to the, i assume, web-based interface on "desktop".

I think one big killer feature Discord has is that you just have to paste in an URL/shortcode to join a server instead of needing to enter an IP and create a username to join every server. It is so much more streamlined to join a Discord server. The voice quality and chat features are both whatever although I would say that Discord feels like a more responsive and less resource intensive application than something like Slack or nuSkype.

The last time I used Slack it was a giant memory hog and used a lot of CPU resources. I don't think Discord would have become nearly as popular compared to say Mumble or Teamspeak it was not also relatively efficient in terms of system resources because PC gamers are very sensitive to big resource hogs.

As far as becoming a digital retail storefront, it has zero advantages compared to the other various competitors. While the other digital retailers do have social features, those social features are generally add-ons that aren't critical to the experience. Many of those storefronts also have API hooks that many developers rely upon for certain game-relevant social features like joining a friend's game in progress.

> Discord "won" in my view because it simply had to be modern to be vastly superior.

Discord "won" because it's literally burning cash and offering a service for free (for example, I don't have to pay for a t2.micro instance to host a Mumble server). But this is obviously not sustainable.

If you're selling a dollar for fifty cents, it's not hard to find a market.

Relaying some text is cheap. If I had to pay 3x the actual server cost to run one (so the rest can go toward development and staff), it would still be minuscule.

My friend circles on discord have enough people with nitro that it's almost certainly cash-positive by a lot.

Yep; it’s important to note that the signaling required to coordinate P2P voice and video is no more expensive than “relaying some text” with modern protocols. The question is whether Discord can remain sufficiently innovative to be ahead of the next thing that tries to disrupt its model. I think it is sufficiently irreverent, and sufficiently independent from B2B stability needs, to be that innovative.

But even if you gave me a free mumble service, it still wouldn't be comparable to Discord - at least when i was using Discord.

The price wasn't the issue (imo), it was simply the user experience. It had the best, by leagues. Users (ie, non hosts) didn't pay for any of these products, but the UX of Discord was vastly superior in my view.

>required install

I'd rather install something compared to using the "webapp" version if it used 30 MB of RAM rather than 3000MB.

Good for you, but it's still optional for the right crowd. More specifically, you don't have to. Users can connect to your gaming group with zero friction. Not even signup! (at least, back in the day, i'm unsure what it's like not)

All of those were a pain in the ass for one reason or another, Discord caught on like wildfire because it was a huge step up from what existed. Pretty much a combination of the best parts of IRC + Teamspeak + Skype.

You don't think Discord has any lockin? For a lot of games, coordinating voice chat these days is "paste a discord server invite in chat". Pretty much any guild/clan/subreddit/group/whatever has a Discord (apart from ones with really old TS servers etc), so if you're in one of those, you probably have Discord. Much easier than negotiating Skype/Mumble/TS3.

I'd say Valve/Steam is feeling a lot more pressure these days than Discord.

I'm not sure Discord will ever be a hugely valuable company, but judging by the fact that every launcher in existence (Steam, Battle.net) is trying to clone their features, I'm sure they can at least sell it for quite a bit.

I was really expecting them to push out of the gaming niche, but with the store it looks like they're doubling down on that angle.

I disagree. It's more connected to communities than IRC/Vent/Skype. Right now I hang out in multiple alpha dev game discords, speedrunning discords, a personal game friends discord, a queer gaming discord, and a tabletop game development discord. The degree to which I'm connected to communities is much stronger than in something like IRC or Vent.

I had 30+ TeamSpeak servers in my browse list, I would easily be in 2 or 3 at each one time, but voice would only work in one at a time!

Thank god.

yes agreed