Discord is one of the most popular communication platforms for gamers. In this series, we'll be going over our journey of building up our community through the popular social app, Discord.

We'll be discussing how to build a Discord server, the various features, and why you should even make a server in the first place, as well as the process on how we decided to build and tailor the server to fit the needs of our studio and community.

For those unaware: Discord is a hugely popular communication app, especially in the gaming community. It allows users to join a server (Like ours!), and connect with other users to chat via voice and text, as well as video chat in private groups. According to Statista, Discord has over 200 Million registered users as of December 2018, and that number has surely grown in the time since.

Discord has many different, unique features that help users interact with each other. Users are able to join many different types of servers at a time. They can organize these however they would like based on their own preferences. Also, those who run servers can customize them however they'd like by adding various channels, bots, user roles, and more.

The Benefits of Discord

As mentioned before, the ever-growing popularity and vast Userbase of Discord within the gaming community makes it the perfect place for developers to bring their fans together.

Discord's various methods of communication allow developers and users to interact seamlessly and quickly with one another. A common feature in servers centered around a specific game and/or studio are channels dedicated to feedback and/or bug reporting.

These channels allow users who are playing or testing a game to very quickly give feedback on what they like or not about a game, and also allows them to report bugs they encounter during gameplay. The beauty of this is that these issues tend to get reported and fixed much faster, and developers can communicate back to the Userbase in real-time.

Another feature of Discord that is great for developers is the @everyone feature, which allows someone to notify (or "ping") everyone in the server when something important comes up. Typically with a game-oriented server, announcements include things like updates/patch note releases, beta sign up opportunities, server maintenance times, and much more. The feature is a great way to get information out to everyone in the community quickly, efficiently, and effectively.

Having a community helps news about a studio's game get out faster, and is a great way to spread the news about the game through word of mouth. Users can create server invites whenever they would like, simply by clicking on an invite link. As a result, inviting friends to a server is extremely simple, so users that particularly enjoy a game or even just the game's community can have their friends join and find out more about it.

Similarly, the announcement and feedback features in a server can have a huge impact on the development of a game. As an example, Behavior Interactive's Deathgarden experienced a lot of negative feedback on its initial launch, much of which was communicated through their Discord server.

The feedback allowed Behavior to work with the community, figure out what wasn't quite working with the game, and as of this past month, Behavior successfully relaunched the game as Deathgarden: Bloodharvest. Before the days of Discord, games were often dead in the water if they weren't well-received on the launch, which typically would lead to poor sales and ultimately layoffs at studios.

Without a dedicated community surrounding a studio, it can be much harder to interact with users and really figure out what does and doesn't work with a game. It's more important now to build a solid community surrounding your game or studio than ever before!

Join Up

Throughout this series, we’ll be going on our community-building journey. This series is designed to share tips and insights to help others build up a loyal fanbase and dedicated group of followers. Learn what works - and what doesn’t work - from our experiences. If you’d like to be a bigger part of our quest, please join our server!