Discord is the place for friends to come together, hang out, and game. Our platform was built by people who love to play games, for people who love to play games. And today, over 90% of the 200 million people using Discord monthly spend over 1.5 billion hours playing thousands of unique titles each month. That’s why we’ve been hard at work building our Embedded App SDK so we can enable even more game developers to bring experiences to Discord that our users love.
Today, we’re excited to announce the next big step in our developer ecosystem: we are officially opening Discord Activities to all developers. Whether you’re creating games, music experiences, or other interactive Activities with the Embedded App SDK, you can now build, launch, distribute, get discovered, and monetize natively on Discord. Read on to learn more.
Reimagining Friend Groups and Social Gameplay
From Day 1, we built Discord as a platform that developers could extend and customize to their needs with apps. Our thriving ecosystem of apps is used by over 25% of our monthly active users, and we’re seeing incredible early traction with early access Activity developers like Death by AI, Krunker Strike FRVR, and Farm Merge Valley.
Since building our first in-house Activity in 2022, we've believed that the unique environment of Discord, where friends hang out in servers and game on voice calls, could foster creativity and innovation in social gaming. As we set out to build the Embedded App SDK, we started to reimagine how friend groups might hang out together when they had easy access to lightweight and highly engaging games that were a click away from anywhere within Discord.
This is where Discord shines. Developers can leverage our naturally social communities to let already engaged players connect, play, and build relationships. True social gaming isn’t just about playing with friends; it’s about finding new ones too — and we make both possible.
When we rolled out the developer preview of the Embedded App SDK earlier this year, it was a hit. Tens of thousands of developers quickly started bringing their ideas to life. We believe this growing interest will push the boundaries of social gaming and help accelerate growth and innovation for a broader set of developers.
Soon after, we started to hear developers asking and thinking about the same types of questions that we'd been exploring around the future of social gaming, Questions like: what would it look like for groups of friends to work together in their games, across the day and over different time zones? How would memes emerge if games had bots that were natively embedded into the actual conversation? How might generative AI evolve with a built-in social communication layer?
Just as we saw with some of the most ubiquitous app ecosystems of the past decade, Discord’s open platform is a new frontier for game developers that will foster a whole new set of concepts and ideas to go viral.
From our conversations with many developers, it’s clear that building on Discord allows them to get straight to the full expression of what they want to build. Developers are finding an accelerated path to product-market fit by building and scaling social games and experiences where a young, early adopter base already hangs out. With access to strong social channels, they can get immediate feedback, fresh ideas, and real-time insights into how people interact with their products.
Playroom's launch of "Death by AI" is a prime example. By gathering user feedback directly on Discord, they were able to prioritize key features and fixes, optimize the game in over 10 languages, add AI voices, introduce new prompt packs, and implement in-app purchases — it captivated nearly 7 million players and accumulated over 1 million hours of gameplay in just weeks.
Users playing Death by AI with the developers of the game, Playroom, and providing feedback directly on Discord
And, they’re just one of many examples of accelerated growth thanks to Discord’s vibrant, naturally social environment. On our platform, developers have a unique chance to connect with the millions of people who have a unique affinity and love for games.
Easier Discovery, More Engagement
Behind the scenes, we’ve been working to improve the overall app experience on Discord. Our goal was to make apps easier to discover, launch, and use to better support your success as a developer.
This week, we announced even more ways to get discovered for Activity developers. It's now easy for any Activity to go through our verification process directly within our Developer Portal and opt-in to discovery. Once discoverable, every user on Discord will be able to discover your Activity in the App Launcher, launch and join your Activity in text and voice channels, and share rich embeds with their friends to join in on the fun.
A user clicks on the brand new App Launcher button in chat, opens the launcher and begins playing Gartic phone. A message appears in the text channel showcasing who is playing the Activity and a button to “Join”
We know how important it is for your apps to grab the attention of millions of users. You’ll be able to leverage native rich presence features that allow your Activity to be discovered organically and spread virally across Discord, directly from servers’ member lists or user profiles. Our recent insights show that social influence significantly boosts game discovery and engagement — users are playing more games, joining voice channels with friends, and trying new titles based on recommendations from friends. Since rolling out these improvements, we’ve seen an additional 1 million game launch days each month.
Unlock New Revenue Streams
As we open our platform to all developers to build, we're also introducing an exciting new monetization feature for developers in the US, UK, and EU on desktop. This will make it easier than ever to leverage our payment rails to turn your creative ideas into sustainable ventures on Discord:
In-App Purchases (IAP): You can now offer one-time purchases or subscriptions directly within your Activity, allowing users to unlock premium features or content.
In addition, starting today, all Activities developers will also be able to take advantage of our existing Premium Apps monetization features including Durable SKUs, Consumable SKUs and analytics tools. We're working on expanding this feature set and availability to more regions soon, opening up even more opportunities for developers worldwide.
Shape the future of Discord together
Today’s updates are a big step forward in our commitment to developers to help you build, share, distribute, get discovered, and monetize your creations.
If you’re a developer looking for a platform to build your game or interactive experience and make your mark, there’s no better time to jump in and deliver rich and exciting ways that make Discord even better for everyone who calls it home.
Let’s build together — right here, where the world plays.
