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Hey, everyone! We’re closing out May and celebrating Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month with a spotlight on Discord’s own Asian Friends & Kinship ERG: a place for Social, Community, Culture, and Education! The ERG recently went through a rebrand and a rename. Read on to hear about the process:
We’ve recently rebranded our ERG from AANHPI ERG to AFK which stands for Asian Friends & Kinship!
Why? Well, a couple of reasons:
This rebrand got some of the AFK ERG’s members to think about their identities and how those play out at Discord and beyond:
Representing Asian identity online and at work is important because it allows for authentic self-expression and helps to break down stereotypes. Growing up, I used to hide aspects of my Chinese American culture, like eating dumplings at lunch, to avoid being judged. Now, sharing those same traditions and foods with my coworkers has become a point of connection and pride as we have such a diverse range of cultural dishes for lunch at the office.
Environments like Discord make it easier to bring our full selves to work, whether it's by introducing colleagues to Mahjong, a beloved family game of mine, or supporting local AANHPI businesses through pop-up events. By sharing our cultures, we foster a richer, more inclusive community where everyone benefits from diverse perspectives and experiences.
It’s not just about representation; it’s about building a workplace where everyone can feel valued and understood.
Being part of the AFK community involves creating a safe space for myself, other members, and allies. As a child growing up in an ethnic minority community, I assumed that I would always be a minority in every space I entered.
This mindset persisted into my professional life. It wasn't until I discovered an existing ERG specifically for the AANHPI community that I began advocating for creating safe spaces. This ERG allows me to comfortably celebrate the Mid Autumn Festival with my coworkers and host arts and crafts events for Lunar New Year. Despite being hundreds of miles away from home, these small in-person events remind me to continue celebrating my culture and sharing my creative skills with my friends.
At the heart of this ERG, it's crucial to understand who you are and what you represent. As leaders of the ERG, we must continuously educate ourselves to help our members and allies better understand themselves. The stronger our roots, the more powerful our voice, and the stronger our community becomes.
My experience being part of the AFK ERG at Discord has been a reintroduction into a community I had written off. Living in the liminality of being a second-generation Indian American, as many children of immigrants can relate to, can feel like living in an eternal sense of shortcoming — not enough of this or that, neither from here nor from there.
The first time someone invited me to join the AFK ERG was during our very first intro chat. Having just barely met me, they identified me as part of Asian Friends & Kinship — more than a surface-level categorization, there was warmth and familiarity in the invite. I felt the same familiarity and kinship the next time I was invited into the ERG, but this time to participate in the leadership committee. Being less than a year into my time at Discord, it’s now been twice that I’ve been invited into spaces and offered opportunities I would have otherwise convinced myself weren’t for me.
In these spaces and with these opportunities, I’ve fostered kinship with people across the company. I’ve rekindled pride in my cultural identity by seeing it reflected in unexpected or aspirational spaces here. I’ve felt inspired to explore what living authentically can look like for me as I reconnect with my cultural identity in a positive and, most importantly, shared environment. Discord, at large, is committed to capturing diversity in hiring with data-driven goals and benchmarks.
To me, this signals an intentional effort against tokenization and breaking down the need to qualify belonging. The AFK rebrand embodies this sense of “come as you are” by disrupting the stereotype of the hyper-productive Asian worker. Like any community, across intersections of identity, Asians are not a monolith — in our land, language, or lived experience.
AFK aims to represent the diversity of the diaspora, in heritage and hobbies. It’s a reminder of kinship, friendship, and humanity. The celebration and solidarity I’ve experienced in the AFK ERG have given me a space to co-create belonging and explore and own my cultural identity.
In addition to the amazing community we’re creating and celebrating internally, this year, Discord is also raising funds for three organizations to drive impact to local and national AANHPI communities:
Asian Mental Health Collective - An org that aims to make mental health available and accessible to Asian communities across the globe.
Project Vision - An organization with a mission to help youth in Chicago’s Greater Chinatown community reach their full potential by providing them with tools for educational, personal, and civic development.
Contemporary Asian Theater Scene - This organization aims to be a catalyst for cultural enrichment by enhancing the vibrant and diverse artistic landscape of the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community.
If you’d like to be a part of the AFK ERGs’ journey and Discord’s company culture, we’d love to have you — consider taking a peek at our jobs page from time to time, there are always new opportunities popping up!
HADES 2 RELEASED IN EARLY ACCESS THIS MONTH!!!!
Okay, now that that’s out of our system, it’s time to talk about all the games we’ve been playing over at Discord for the last month! May saw a huge boom of incredible indie game releases, including Animal Well, Little Kitty Big City, and one I’ve been personally waiting for: Crow Country.
For May, we’ve got Matt, Emi, Jonathan, Tracie, and Mark ready to dish out the news on what they’ve been playing. If you read last month’s Staff Picks and were wondering if Matt cleared anything out in his backlog, bad news: the answer is “no,” and “the backlog got bigger.”
Now if you’ll excuse me, while everyone talks about what they played, MultiVersus finally (re)released this week and I’ve been missing my main Reindog.
May seems to be the “play games you never finished from your deep backlog”. They include…
Gimme Doom or Wolfenstein! Or a “surprise! We were working on Fallout 5 the whole time and it comes out at the end of this year!” from Bethesda
See above and then add Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, Destiny 2: The Final Shape, and The Rogue Prince of Persia.
Welcome to Patch Notes! Each month, we comb through the newest changes in performance, reliability, responsiveness, usability, and general bug-squishing we’ve done to make Discord better.
If you discover a bug of your own, check out our Bimonthly Bug Megathread on the community-ran r/DiscordApp subreddit. Tell us what’s been bothering you and our Engineering team will be more than happy to check it out.
All fixes listed below have been committed and merged, but may still be rolling out to individual platforms at the time of this post.
A message from our CEO about the next chapter of Discord, how we’re building an even faster, more powerful app to take us there, and a new look to match where we’re headed.
Discord just turned nine this month and we’ve had a lot of fun celebrating with many of you. Now, as we begin our tenth trip around the sun, I want to share what we’re focused on as we look to the next decade — but first, let’s travel back in time to when my cofounder Stan and I started this crazy journey.
Twelve years ago, we had a hunch that multiplayer gaming would be the future of entertainment and that people would need a well-made communications platform to talk with their gaming friends. With the explosion of mobile gaming, faster internet, and more easily accessible computers, we knew more and more people would be playing live multiplayer video games like we did, but wow! We had no idea how big gaming would become.
Today, gaming has become the largest form of entertainment in the world, bigger than movies and music combined, and it’s the fastest growing as well. It’s a major way people use their personal devices, including PCs, smartphones, tablets, or consoles. People of all generations are playing games across many genres, from Minecraft, to Overwatch, to Wordle.
Nowadays, Discord is used by 200 million people every month for many different reasons, but there’s one thing that nearly everyone does on our platform: play video games. Over 90% of y’all play games, spending a combined 1.5 billion hours playing thousands of unique titles on Discord each month!
When we talk to the people who use Discord, it’s so clear that it holds a special place in many of your lives, and that playing games together is a major way you spend your time with friends (not to mention other things like cooking dinner, studying for finals, or all the fun ways you hang out on VC together).
The games we play bring us together, give us something to do with one another, and as a result, help us deepen our friendships. They provide us with a way to have fun with our favorite people, whether we want to relax and farm turnips or grind in competitive matches for diamond rank.
When I was a kid, that's why I got into video games. It was a way to spend time with my friends and family. It was kind of a niche thing back then, but I loved it. When Stan and I met, we realized we had this in common. Whether it was an endless “just one more round” of Street Fighter 2, microing Zerglings, or idling for hours in town in Final Fantasy XI, games have always been about deepening friendships.
One of the most exciting things about our society openly embracing conversations around mental health is witnessing the innovation of our care models for those who seek and deserve it. While I’m a big believer in talk therapy, I don’t believe talk therapy should be the only treatment modality we champion for support.
Throughout my career, I’ve had the joy and privilege of facilitating wellness circles for adolescents of color. I love working with groups because it allows those in attendance to realize they’re not alone in their journey and struggles, provides peer affirmation in their experiences, and allows them to learn from one another.
When I came across Hero Journey Club, a service that provides emotional support while letting people play their favorite games during their conversations, I couldn’t wait to learn more!
Below, meet Brian Chhor, CEO and Co-Founder, and Derrick Hull, Chief Clinical Officer. I had the opportunity to chat with them both and learn more about the why and how of Hero Journey Club. Check out below!
Brian: Hero Journey Club provides mental health support groups inside games like Animal Crossing, Minecraft, Roblox, Stardew Valley, and a broad range of games. The whole premise is that we take therapy out of the clinic and into spaces where people spend time. Our sessions are facilitated by Journey Guides. Our Journey Guides are, Masters or Doctorate level clinicians in social work, marriage & family therapy, counseling, clinical psychology, etc., who deliver subclinical support. They do not treat or diagnose, and Hero Journey Club is not a replacement for therapy. If therapy is like Kinesiology or physical therapy, think of Hero Journey Club like SoulCycle, Peloton, or CrossFit, where you go to work on yourself and get better. It's anchored on the group itself, not on a treatment path.
While our Journey Guides are not treating or diagnosing, everything we do is anchored in evidence-based practices. Individuals are matched into groups based on how they respond to certain questions within the application. Once placed, groups meet at the same time and day once a week for 80 minutes with the same group of people over Discord audio. Group members are encouraged to take ownership of their journey and to discontinue sessions once they feel ready.
Our mission is to make it possible for people to get the care they need, in the places that feel most comfortable to them, where support is less clinical and less pathologizing. They’re just humans working on their own journey.
Brian: There's something about finding ways to connect people around the things they care about that matters a lot; a lot of nuance goes into it. Someone can be placed in a group because they indicated that they like one specific anime, but they don't like another particular kind of anime. Within our Discord, we’ve set up different guilds, or servers. We first match people to a guild and then from the guild, they’ll be matched with their group. We have a wide range of guilds that span across ages and games. Some guilds are more cozy core, others play a wide range of games. Some guilds are middle-aged women; others skew younger. It’s all based on the information included in their application.
Brian: Outside of hosting the sessions, we have moderation, crisis management, and other pipelines set up to allow our moderation team to go in and quickly see what’s happening across the board. We have crisis de-escalation and routing; we have isolation if folks are in immediate crisis where we can quarantine them and get them the support they need. Everything in our back-end is HIPPA compliant and secured because we built the system ourselves. We’re very proud that people tell us that we are the kindest place on the internet they’ve come across.
Brian: Journey Guides will do a quick check-in at the top of the session; in the very beginning, there are intros but once the group is established, there’s a check-in on how the week’s been going for our group members. That helps our Journey Guides contextualize the support in whatever is happening in real life. From there, the group will pick a theme they want to work on. The Journey Guide may share some resources such as a tool, video, or worksheet centered around the theme. If the group is really familiar with one another, they might go around sharing their stories and members will jump in to validate or share their own. As this is happening, they're in a game doing other stuff as well. At the end of the 80 minutes, they wrap up with intention.
Brian: It varies. In the beginning, we didn't do a ton of gaming because we found that people actually wanted to do their own thing. They’d play Apex or Elder Ring or Stardew Valley while in session and that was fine for them.
In the last year or so, we’ve had new groups where we’re shifting more towards built-in activities within games. So in Minecraft, we've built gigantic worlds that may represent grief and anxiety and other simulations that support stress management and we can talk about why someone raised their voice when they got stressed in the game, and how else does that show up. We also have people in our community who are neurodivergent who created a Dungeon and Dragons game to talk about their feelings and emotions using principles from internal family systems to navigate that as someone who is autistic.
In games like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley that are more mellow, there are activities that we’ve built that are more generalized. It might look like let’s create a hut that represents your inner child, or, instead of tracking your emotions in a journal, let’s track your emotions in a plot of land with flowers. You can look at your flower garden and say the blue flowers represent when I was feeling down, the red ones when I was excited and you can quickly see what you were feeling in the last month or so.
Derrick: One of the things we measure when individuals sign up is problematic gaming, which is playing games to the point where it may negatively impact daily responsibilities such as relationships, work, and one’s health. We measure this to ensure engagement in our groups remains at a healthy level. There are two things we’ve found that are important and interesting: One is the rates of problem gaming are very low - less than 2% of individuals who’ve signed up for the program. Secondly, and in support of the hypothesis that problematic gaming is an effect and not a cause of mental health challenges, is that as individuals improve in terms of their symptoms and how well they are functioning we also see their reports of problematic gaming going down as well. There’s nice evidence that these two things swing together.
Late last year, we rebuilt our mobile app to help make talking with your friends way faster, way smoother, and way easier. The UI was streamlined to help you see what they’re up to, start or join group chats faster, and we even added new ways to make Discord your own (you’re finally official, OLED theme!).
It’s been a few months since then, and we’ve been collecting all your feedback about the new mobile app and taking all your sentiments to heart. There’s… a lot of feedback — shoutout to the tabletop shop employee who saw my Discord staff hoodie, powerwalked up, and immediately brought up the mobile app.
With your feedback and ideas, we’ve been working on new updates to the mobile app based on your experience now that it’s been out for a few months. Today, we’d like to share a few updates to the mobile app in regards to Search and Tab Navigation, along with improved Accessibility and Performance.
When we launched the new mobile redesign, we separated Servers and DMs into dedicated tabs in the hopes that it would let you reach your friends and communities faster.
Over time, we heard consistent feedback that it makes it hard to mentally switch between mobile and desktop. Splitting Servers and DMs apart on mobile meant the people and places you care about live in different areas than they do on desktop!
We’ve decided to fuse the Servers and Messages tabs back together into one, letting you see which of your friends are DMing you while you’re exploring the channels of your favorite servers. We know some of you may have gotten used to DMs and Servers split out — lots of us internally got used to it, too!
However, the overarching feedback about confusing navigation when Servers and Friends are separated is loud and clear. We want to make sure navigating to your important people and places on Discord feels consistent across all platforms Discord is on, whether you’re on desktop or mobile.
Hi Players!
You typically hear from us on PUBG.com or our Global PUBG Discord Channel (drop by and say hi!). Today, however, we're taking over the Discord Blog to share some exciting news: Our iconic map Erangel Classic is back on the Battlegrounds! This isn't just a comeback; it's a celebration of our origins and a tribute to the days of strategizing and triumphing with comrades.
Reflecting on those early days, did you know that Discord has been our main communication platform with players since the launch of PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS? It’s fitting then, that we mark this reunion with special, Discord-exclusive items to give back to you, the players.
From May 14th to May 28th, you’ll have a chance to claim the exclusive “The Original Is Back”-Pack. Here’s how you can join in and claim your exclusive rewards:
Psst... Special Streaming Channel Alert! Want to show off your strategic chops? Stream on our PUBG Discord Channel. We've set up a dedicated streaming channel just for the Quest. It’s a great place to display your gameplay and connect with like-minded players. Come over, have fun, and you might just find some new squadmates!
If you missed the Quest the first time it popped up in-app, no worries — you can also find the Quest in User Settings > Gift Inventory.
Here's the Discord Changelog from May 13, 2024. You can also find the most recent Changelog in the Discord app under Settings > What's New.
Discord turns 9 this May! And birthdays mean presents… but for YOU. 🫵
Over the next nine days, we’ll be giving away one-of-a-kind prizes and stuff that makes gaming with your friends on Discord way more fun. Keep an eye out on our social media accounts such as X (US, Japan, France) and Instagram!
We also brought you gifts *right here, right now* in the form of new ways to spend time with your friends and bug fixes to make that time as frictionless as possible. Read on to see what’s new!
It’s our 9th BIRTHDAY!! That means presents… but this time, we’re giving YOU stuff!
Starting Monday, May 13th, we’re celebrating our 9th birthday with nine days of celebration and giveaways! Watch on our social media accounts, including X (US, Japan, France) and Instagram — over those nine days, we’re giving away one-of-a-kind prizes that make gaming with your friends on Discord way more fun.
What are those unique, one-of-a-kind prizes? Lucky you, you’re in the perfect place to find out!
We’ve partnered with some amazingly talented makers to give out these one-of-a-kind presents that are uniquely Discord:
Read on to see what these four talented crafters made! If something catches your eye, direct those eyeballs toward our social media pages for a chance to win something good.
So what sort of prize did you make!?
For Discord's 9th year celebration, we made Discord a custom Wumpus keyboard rug of his face cutout :P
What’s the process for making something as wonderous as this?
The process of transforming Wumpus into a keyboard rug begins by projecting an image of Wumpus onto a stretched cloth canvas to precisely trace [their] cute face. Next, a machine is used to punch acrylic yarn at a rapid speed, creating a cut-pile carpet texture while filling and threading in the colors accordingly. Finally, a strong adhesive is applied to bond the yarn and fabric together, ensuring the mat is machine-washable and capable of providing years of enjoyment.
What about Discord’s look or style did you incorporate when designing your prize?
While designing [this Wumpus rug], I wanted to keep in mind his unique colors, and with slight shade variations of yarn, called for color matching in person. Matching colors can be extremely difficult online and deceiving, which made the perfect opportunity for a scavenger hunt through my local towns; thankfully no rain. Rain and yarn aren't really good friends.
What do you hope the winner feels when they get their prize?
Hopefully, the winner feels an unexpected surprise that lights up their day!
Discord’s Go Live feature is designed to bring high-quality, high-framerate streams of games or applications at a low enough latency that lets viewers talk and interact with the streamer in real time. Check out our first blog post all about Go Live here to catch up.
To achieve both the quality and speed needed for Go Live, Discord uses its own custom capture and encoding code that integrates with operating systems and video drivers, using WebRTC to transport the video from streamer to viewer.
To keep latency low, WebRTC is constantly tuning target bitrates and frame rates based on what's going on in the transport in real time.
Even with this parameter adaptation, we’ve seen cases where we weren’t happy with the visual quality or encoding performance of Go Live. Sessions using AMD graphics cards seemed particularly worse — we even had a Discord staff member tell us about the choppy and blocky streaming experience on their new PC with a recent AMD video card.
So… how can we fix this? Let’s dive in together and make Go Live the best it can be:
In video compression, a “key frame” is a self-contained video frame that depends on no previous content. When either a new viewer joins a Go Live session or an existing viewer loses the previous picture, a new key frame must be sent. Following the new key frame, a much smaller “delta frame” is used instead which only encodes the changes from the previous frame.
In a well-behaved Go Live stream, key frames are typically 6 to 10 times the data size of a delta frame. These key frames need to be large enough to provide enough context for the following frames, but small enough to not congest the user’s network or slow down delivery of the video. One way to avoid the tradeoffs presented by optimizing key frames is to send as few key frames as possible.
When working to optimize Go Live, we found some of the adjustments we were making to key frames and delta frames ended up causing the encoder to completely reset and produce a new key frame every parameter update. Instead of getting a key frame every 60 seconds, we were spitting out keyframes *every time* webrtc signaled a frame rate change - up to once a second! Sending these large key frames at such a rapid rate was eating up all of the allocated bandwidth.
To meet our target of one key frame per minute, we had been asking our encoder to update an internal key frame interval about once per second as frame rate counts were updating. However, this API was always forcing a new key frame. We stopped calling that API all together and instead just started counting frames and time on the outside to figure out when a key frame should be inserted.
Changing the API we used to ask the encoder for key frames solved this problem! Now, the system was only sending a key frame every 60 seconds, causing key frames to take up much less bandwidth. Less bandwidth, more streaming, more fun!
Welcome to the first edition of Patch Notes! In this new feature on the Discord Blog, we’re combing through the newest technical fixes and the nitty-gritty details we’ve implemented to make Discord better.
This year, we’ve brought tons of talented engineers and developers together to focus on taking their metaphorical flyswatters and salt guns to those pesky bugs you might encounter while using Discord.
Expect Patch Notes to contain the exact details regarding changes in performance, reliability, responsiveness, usability, and general bug-squishing. The in-app Changelog you know and love will still be home to new feature announcements and the “fun” stuff.
With intros out of the way, let’s take a peek at the latest fixes our expert engineers implemented to make Discord better! All fixes listed below have been committed and merged, but may still be rolling out to individual platforms at the time of this post.
Welcome back to our little videogame shop! Within the last month in the gaming world: fan-favorite MOBA Gigantic made its return to form, supernatural sniper-puzzler Children of the Sun released to plenty of community praise on Steam, and both Sea of Thieves and Grounded made their multiplatform debuts. (Ever tried using Discord's cross-platform voice chat on Xbox or PS5 before?)
Our roster of Discord Staff gaming specialists have been playing games new and old this month, and they’re ready to dish out the deets on what they’re playing as of late.
This month, we’ve got Alex, Emi, Matt, and Cody coming together in the store’s break room to discuss what they recommend you check out.
Without further ado, let’s see what they’ve got to share:
2024 started with a few months of quality but long and narrative-heavy RPG releases (Infinite Wealth, FFVII Rebirth, Dragon’s Dogma 2, etc.) so I’m recommending something to serve as a little respite before the RPG releases pick up again.
My Staff Pick for April is Crypt of the Necrodancer or its Zelda-themed spinoff, Cadence of Hyrule. Both are roguelikes but make the pressure of potentially dying and losing all your progress better because of their tracks by Danny Baranowsky (The Binding of Isaac, Super Meat Boy).
As I noted last month, a game’s soundtrack contributes heavily to if a game makes my list. But Crypt of the Necrodancer and Cadence of Hyrule take “immersive soundtrack” to another level. In addition to your usual dungeon-crawling fare, these roguelikes are part rhythm game and require you to move and attack to the beat of the BGM for score multipliers and stronger attacks.
A sequel, Rift of the Necrodancer, was announced one year ago today and is slated for release sometime in 2024. Consider adding one or both of these games to your regular rotation as a palate cleanser between intense RPGs and to gear up for Rift’s release later this year!
No, I usually play games right when they come out and buy a digital copy in addition to the physical so I can play right at release time. Even the few live service games I play have set content release schedules (ie. expansions in MMOs). So, if anything, my gaming habits just revolve around the seasons of game releases.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, a game I backed 4 years ago, is finally coming out on April 23rd. “2024” seemed like such an unreachable year back in July of 2020, but here we are. I’m writing this before the game has come out, otherwise it might’ve been my Staff Pick for the month. Check back to see if it holds up and receives my rec in a future post.
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is also coming out for Switch on May 23rd, and I’m so excited I can play it without having to buy a $100+ second-hand GameCube disc (was pretty close to biting the bullet though last year).
Generative AI is attracting attention as the technology has progressed in leaps and bounds in recent years, offering fresh ways to solve user problems. Since it's a relatively new area in terms of its practical application, figuring out how to start building with LLMs (large language models) can be challenging. We're excited to share our approach for solving problems with generative AI, along with insights on rapidly launching new features leveraging this technology.
We break down the process of building with LLMs into a few stages. Starting with product ideation and defining requirements, we first need to figure out what we’re building and how it can benefit users. Next, we develop a prototype of our idea, learn from small-scale experiments, and repeat that process until our feature is in a good state. Finally, we fully launch and deploy our product at scale. In this post, we will dive deeper into each stage of this process.
We start by having empathy for our users and for our staff - what are the opportunities that generative AI can help address? Like machine learning in general, generative AI is a tool — and one that shouldn’t be applied when other tools are a better fit. When it comes to identifying where generative AI can make an impact, we dig into challenges that commonly:
The sun peeks over the horizon. The neon sign on the window flickers to life, and a bell jingles as the front door of your favorite local game shop swings forward — it’s time to open up shop!
We’re starting something new on the Discord Blog today: Staff Picks. Every month, a few Discord employees will let everyone know what they’ve been playing recently, why they’ve enjoyed it so much, and give recommendations on what they think you should try out, too!
A little backstory if you’ve never been to a locally-owned game shop before: along the shelves of certain stores, you might see cards or signs with an employee’s name and their recommendations if you’re unsure what to play. We’re doing that, but on the Discord Blog!
For this first article in the series, think of it as your first time at the game shop! You’ll meet the faces you’ll start to get familiar with over time, and hear what they tend to play and what they’ve played this month.
Let’s meet the staff lineup!
What’s your name? What do you do at Discord?
Matt, Gaming Platform Partnerships. I've been at Discord for just over five years. I've had the privilege of working with game devs and major game platforms. My work has spanned across Discord Game Stores, to building verified servers, to integrating Game SDKs, to launching awesome products like Discord voice on console.
What platforms do you usually play games on?
PC, PS5, Xbox, Steam Deck, and sometimes my phone.
What’s your most played game this month?
It's a three-way tie between Helldivers 2, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.
Tell us one game recommendation for us to get to know you well.
The original DOOM. id Software overall is the studio that converted me into the obsessive gamer I am today: Starting with Commander Keen, then blowing my mind with taking down Mecha-Hitler in Wolfenstein 3D, but DOOM is a game I spent years playing before moving on to anything else (also probably because I didn't have enough allowance money to play anything else).
Here's the Discord Changelog from April 3, 2024. You can also find the most recent Changelog in the Discord app under Settings > What's New.
The newest season of THE FINALS is underway as we speak (or, type?), and we’re doing something special with our friends at Embark Studios in celebration of the new mode, map, ability, weapons, and gadgets that have been added!
For the next two weeks, you can get your hands on the Discord-exclusive “Skill Issue” set for THE FINALS by completing a Quest. Desktop players can head into their Gift inventory (User Settings > Gift Inventory) to get started, and thanks to the game’s cross-progression feature, you can use your newly-earned Skill Issue set anywhere you play THE FINALS after redeeming your code.
We’d tell a whole story about how cool this set looks, but you’re probably itching to get your new cosmetic set ASAP. Alright alright, let’s dig right in.
Here’s the objective: Accept the Quest on Discord in the Gift Inventory, fire up THE FINALS, and stream your gameplay in any server you’re in with at least one friend for 15 minutes. (And try and pull off a sick play to impress ‘em, or better yet, invite them to join your team and play along.)
And… that’s it! After 15 minutes of streaming, your Quest is complete and the “Skill Issue” set redemption code will be waiting for you in your Gift Inventory! Use your new set as you dive into the game’s new map, try out those shiny new gadgets, and play a few rounds of THE FINALS.
Simply put: stream cool game while you play it to your friends on Discord, get rewarded with a cool thing in THE FINALS. It’s almost as easy as solo-carrying your friends to victory.
If you aren’t seeing the Quest in Settings or your gameplay isn’t being counted, double-check in User Settings > Privacy & Safety > In-game rewards on the desktop app to make sure you’re sharing the deets on what game you’re playing with us. (We can’t give you your sweet reward if we can’t see you’re playing THE FINALS, ya’know?)
Don’t delay: The Skill Issue set is exclusively available in Discord until April 16 at 11:59 pm UTC. While the Quest awaits you for two weeks, your redemption code remains valid until May 30, 2024 at 11:59 pm EDT. See Terms and Conditions below. (Don’t forget to claim your code after you finish the Quest!)
If you’ve never seen a Discord Quest before and could use some detailed set-up guidance, take a peek at the Discord Quests support article. If you’re already used to streaming PC games to your friends on Discord, you’ll get it down fast.
Once you’ve unlocked your exclusive reward, share it with us! Take a screenshot or clip, and mention us on X, TikTok, or Instagram! We’d love to see you rep it in-game. 🙏
If you’re a developer interested in running your own Discord Quest and rewarding your players for playing what they love with their friends, get in touch with us here.
From the moment the idea of Discord was born – baby Wumpus, you might say – our CEO, Jason Citron, was focused on one of the most important questions for a growing company to answer: “How do you create a place where people can thrive doing their best work?”
Since then, we’ve grown our team and heard how they would describe and capture the essence of what makes working at Discord special. At Discord, we live by these seven Wumpus principles!
Take the time to get to know people and find common ground. Remember that we are all working towards the same goal. Start from a place of trust, assume good intent, and seek to understand other points of view before passing judgment.
Deliver solutions that meet the needs of the people we serve. Strive to deeply understand how what you are working on helps customers from first principles and invent creative approaches to meet them. Focus on their needs, not what the competition is doing.
Surprise & delight comes from caring about the million little details of how a person experiences your work. Put the right emotion in when they least expect it to deliver the magic. This applies to how we show up with each other too!
When you own a decision, involve your stakeholders, get informed through data, have constructive debates, and make a decision. When you are part of a decision or when you aren't, share your thoughts respectfully. When a decision is made, regardless of whether you agree with it, commit to bringing it to life with excellence. Transparency is our goal, not consensus.
All big things start small. Think long-term and break ideas down so you can start delivering value and learning right away. Strive for an 80/20 approach and compound from there. This is the essence of moving fast with both excellence and surprise & delight.
Take risks (big and small) to do things that matter and don't be afraid to change directions based on what you learn. Inspect reality — using data when you can — to determine whether it is working or not. If it's working, keep going. When it's not, don't be afraid to cut your losses. Always learn what went right and wrong to do better next time.
Seize the opportunity to do incredible work that you can be proud of every single day. Learn more, ask questions, improve yourself, improve our company, and help those around you reach their maximum potential.
Playing games with your friends is what Discord’s all about. It’s not just us saying that… every month, people on Discord play a collective 1.5 billion hours across 60,000 unique games. And of those 60,000 games, VALORANT stands out among the 5 most-played games on the platform.
We also know that Discord is the place for anyone who plays games to show off what they’re into, and what better place to show that off than on your Discord profile! Whether you’re deep into the competitive scene or a certain character from something you played recently speaks to you, someone’s Discord profile speaks a thousand words about ‘em — and that’s not including the words they wrote in their bio.
The Shop launched last September to help express who you are even better. Along with your avatar and bio, the Shop lets you build a digital wardrobe of different looks for your profile, bringing more Anime, Fantasy, and even Cyberpunk aesthetics to your Discord looks, and put the final touches on your presentation.
But ever since the launch, we've heard from many of you that you want GAMING styles. Today, we’re super excited to bring you our limited-time VALORANT collection: a new set of Avatar Decorations and Profile Effects featuring fan-favorite Agents Jett, Reyna, and Omen. Joining them is the newest Agent revealed this week: Clove. (Yes, we have items featuring them, too!)
With Episode 8 Act 2 of VALORANT in full swing, we figured it’d be a great opportunity to work with our friends at Riot Games and combine two things people love to do on Discord: playing VALORANT and making your Discord profile perfectly express who you are.
While you’re here, check out the slick trailer showcasing VALORANT’s newest Agent we mentioned, Clove. Clove uses their gift of immortality to get the upper hand on their enemies, providing cover from beyond the grave or springing back into action to clutch a round.
This VALORANT Collection is available until May 7th, so make sure you grab what you like before it disappears in the smoke. Never explored the Shop before? It’s easy to get there, so follow along if you’d like some backup!
If “Shop” in the context of Discord is completely new to you, no worries — it’s just as quick as purchasing your equipment at the beginning of a round of VALORANT.
The next time you open up the desktop or web app, you’ll see a Shop tab right as you open it. Click that, and you’ll head straight to the Shop.
From there, it’s up to you! Preview what a particular avatar decoration or profile effect looks like on your profile by clicking on it. If you purchase it, you can use it in your profile even after the VALORANT collection leaves the Shop.
Tie it all together with a matching avatar to set up a killer profile combo to impress your friends and style on your rivals. If you’ve got Nitro, you can also pair your new VALORANT items with a profile banner and profile colors, and even use your decorations on a per-server basis!
The VALORANT collection will be available in the Shop until May 7th, so grab whichever one calls to you while you can — no need to queue up with a squad before entering the Shop.
If you’ve never played VALORANT, what’re ya waitin’ for?! It’s available to download on Windows PCs, so head on over to the official site and give it a shot. It might end up being your newest obsession — there’s a reason why it’s in the top 5 most-played games on Discord.