Messaging and chat service Discord has made a clear statement that it’s moving beyond the realms of gaming.
Per The Verge, Discord have raised a further $100m in funding to “help accelerate our investment in the community, new features, and the company.”
Those new features, driving by user requests, will transform Discord into a more open tool for communication beyond gaming – think business, education and beyond.
“Games are what brought many of you on the platform, and we’ll always be grateful for that. As time passed, a lot of you realized, and vocalized, that you simply wanted a place designed to hang out and talk in the comfort of your own communities and friends.”
“You wanted a place to have genuine conversations and spend quality time with people, whether catching up, learning something, or sharing ideas. A place where you and your world can truly belong.”
And that’s from the official blog post out today on it.
They’re also simplifying matters when it comes to branding by tagging Discord as “your place to talk”.
While Slack – also a previous gaming house – has become the go-to for business communications in recent years, Discord sees itself as a similar proposition, but spanning the social conversation, not strictly business.
If you’re a regular Discord user as a gamer, expect new neighbours.
The new homepage design also lends itself to the new messaging, citing “Whether you’re part of a school club, gaming group, worldwide art community, or just a handful of friends that want to spend time together, Discord makes it easy to talk every day and hang out more often.”
The stats don’t lie
- Discord has more than 100 million monthly active users.
- They spend 4 billion minutes in conversation daily
- There’s 6.7 million active Discord servers.
- Weekly, it’s 26 billion server conversation minutes across 12.5 million active servers.
