Discord was created to bring friends together around games. A lot has changed since Discord started in 2015, as it’s grown to welcome hundreds of millions of people who play games and enjoy so many other experiences together. One thing has stayed true: helping people deepen their friendships by playing games remains the heart and soul of why we do what we do at Discord. 

A lot has changed since 2015 for the games industry too. Today, more of us are playing on multiple devices, and more games than ever are launching each year. On Discord alone, we host 1.5 billion hours of gameplay across more than 60,000 titles every month. This is all awesome, except it’s becoming really difficult for game developers to break through and bring their ideas to life as a successful business. 

Over the years, we’ve spent a lot of time with devs to learn about the intersection of our worlds and how we might be able to make Discord better for them, and even partner with them to bring you more cool stuff. They brought some really interesting ideas about how we could help, so today we’re announcing a few new tools that we hope will make building a gaming business a little easier. Let’s talk about how we’ll expand Quests and our Shop.

Opening up Quests to more games

Quests are a way for players to discover games and earn rewards for playing them on Discord. We started experimenting with them over the last year, and millions of you opted in and completed them. We’ve heard great feedback from developers who partnered with us to create them and from many of you who completed one. If you didn’t see firsthand, the "May the 4th" Fortnite Quest is a great example. Now, we’re opening up sponsored Quests to more game developers. 

Quests will show up tastefully in Discord where you can opt-in to stream your game to friends and win rewards for playing. Some players will be made aware that a Quest is available, while others will discover it as their friends accept and embark on the Quest. Developers and publishers who sponsor Quests will work with our team to build an experience that showcases their game and offers a reward tailored for their game.

Expanding Our Shop

The second thing we’re announcing today is themed items in our Shop in partnership with game developers. 

Last year we launched the Shop where you can buy frames for your avatar or fancy effects for your profile to flash them up, and a lot of you have purchased one. We really appreciate that!

It's been so cool to see how people style their profiles with different effects. Some favorite themes, perhaps unsurprisingly, have been anime and fantasy. We've heard a lot of feedback on the kinds of decorations that you’d like to see, including cosmetics themed to the games you love. 

We've come up with a way to make this happen by working with developers to bring themed profile effects and avatar decorations to the Shop. And most importantly, we’ll be sharing the revenue of those purchases with developers so they can make additional money from their amazing creativity through Discord. 

Today we can't tell you exactly which games they’ll be because we signed this NDA thing. You’ll just have to wait a few weeks. We're very excited about sharing these with you all very soon. 

That’s it for today

2024 began with some incredible game launches and it looks like it’s going to be a really fun year. We’re excited to help developers bring their ideas to life so they can build stronger businesses in ways that make it more fun for everyone to discover and play games. 

Developers can check out the Quests launch page and sign up to chat with our team here. In the coming weeks, you’ll start to see our first Quest and themed Shop items. When you see them, let us know what you think!

GL HF.
Peter