Games have never been more social but the tools for connecting with friends and fellow fans across the gaming realm are still surprisingly fractured. Discord hopes to fix that with a new Social SDK it’s making available to developers to allow them to integrate the platform’s tools and perks directly into their games. It’s the company’s latest attempt to become more deeply ingrained in the very fabric of modern gaming.
The SDK—which is already being used by Theorycraft Games (Supervive), Facepunch Studios (Rust), 1047 Games (Splitgate 2), and others, Discord announced on Monday—accomplishes this goal of deeper integration with games in two ways. The first is by giving publishers and studios familiar off-the-shelf solutions for friends’ lists and other in-game social features, which could be especially useful for indie developers who don’t have the bandwidth or budget to invest in building those tools themselves. The second is by bringing data from those games into Discord to improve the functionality of its app on PC and mobile.
“When you’re playing the game that has the SDK integrated, the way that that game shows up in Discord is essentially super powered and will continue to get better,” VP of Product Peter Sellis told Kotaku in an interview. Discord already shows you what games your friends are currently playing and lets them share game invites but the SDK would let these features evolve. “So instead of just inviting your friend to your party,” he said, “it could be a richer invite that says, ‘Hey, the party has three out of five people and we need a support player for League of Legends.’”
Players won’t need to have a Discord account to use in-game features, but linking accounts will be the main way this extra functionality gets unlocked. Another example includes being able to have chat menus in an MMO be connected. These “linked channels” then let people who are already playing communicate directly with friends who haven’t booted the game up yet or want to follow along at work on their smartphones. The record created in Discord also makes it easier for everyone to coordinate strategy and keep up with events even if they missed that night’s play session.
Can Discord save gaming?
The Social SDK comes at an interesting inflection point for Discord, a platform which originally snowballed in popularity within gaming circles by simply being free and working well. Now, after taking a detour during the pandemic into maybe being a general use meeting and chat platform, the company has doubled back down on gaming, but with renewed ambitions of growth. That’s led to fears that Discord might be entering its enshittification phase.
Sellis wouldn’t say if Discord was profitable in 2024—“I cannot, unfortunately, answer questions or speculate, especially on financial stuff”—or if it’s planning to go public—“I hope that we can keep Discord amazing for our players, because I’m one of them, but I cannot comment on speculation”—but the company is now keen to emphasize the value of the platform beyond just being a “cozy” online place to chill out and game with friends. One of those pitches is Discord as a mechanism for game discovery.
A presentation making the rounds earlier this year by analyst and venture capital CEO Matthew Ball painted an exceptionally grim picture of the state of the video game industry in 2025, with continued layoffs alongside console manufacturers and game makers struggling to bring in new players. Ball also honed in on some potential bright spots, though, one of which was Discord. According to his research, Discord users play a more diverse array of games on average than the rest of the market, and it’s only becoming more varied over time. While the top five games like Fortnite monopolize nearly 50 percent of all hours played on PC, that number is only 30 percent for Discord users and trending downward.
Word of mouth has always been important for games, especially the ones without massive marketing campaigns behind them, and Ball argues that Discord is an increasing driver of it. Unlike Twitch streamers and YouTubers who can catapult unknown games up the Steam bestseller charts overnight by broadcasting gameplay to hundreds of thousands, Discord drives word of mouth differently, as friends casually stream gameplay to one another in small groups.
Will Discord become Facebook?
One upside for developers to Discord becoming more deeply embedded in their games is the potential to get those games in front of the friends of people who aren’t already playing them. “The most authentic and reliable way you discover games is with your friends,” Sellis said. “The data basically say extremely loud and clear that if you play with your friends, if you stream the game and they watch it, your friends are more likely to try the game and more likely to play for longer and so we’re just trying to essentially enable that to happen at scale.”
That’s what’s behind the company’s recent push for Quests, paid pop-ups that advertise in-game rewards and other unlockables people can get for playing certain games. When Final Fantasy XVI came to PC last year, users could earn the game’s adorable wolf as a Discord avatar decoration if they played for 15 minutes or more. In December, a Quest for World of Warcraft let players earn a Crown of the Violet Rose. Unlike the others, however, that pop-up was sponsored by Mountain Dew.
“We were we were worried that users would be quite annoyed at seeing a Mountain Dew ad,” Sellis told Kotaku. “But it was actually more like Mountain Dew was subsidizing their World of Warcraft play, which feels really good because you’re like, I was going to play this Friday night anyway with the buddies, now Mountain Dew is going to give me rewards for playing. Okay, sounds great.” Of course, the point of the paid pop-up is that even those who don’t already play World of Warcraft will see it, and building a massive advertising business around Discord’s 200 million monthly active users is one way to be profitable and turn heads on Wall Street in the case of an eventual IPO.
When I asked Sellis if Discord was going to become the next Facebook five years down the road—a social media surveillance platform everyone hates but many struggle to escape—he was adamant that the company’s number one focus remains Discord’s performance and reliability, and the business model continues to be driven by paid subscriptions. “The biggest predictor of Nitro subscription rates is basically how much value you get out of Discord, not how many times we tell you about Nitro. It’s literally just like you spend more time on voice playing games with your friends, and then you find value in Nitro,” he said.
Sellis calls the subscription, which unlocks HD streaming, bigger file uploads, more custom emoji, and other social perks, “incentive compatible.” In theory what’s good for Discord is good for boosting paid subscriptions, preventing the platform from becoming monetized to death and a pain to use as a result. “I think the Social SDK really starts to kind of expand the window with which Discord is highly relevant as the social tool for people who play games,” he said. “And our hope is that it gets people playing different games, more games with their friends, more time with their friends on voice, which we think is a very authentic way of talking and antithetical to a lot of the social network-driven things out there today. And that benefits game publishers, game players, and because of what I talked about with Nitro, it implicitly benefits Discord as well.”
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