'So when I played Overwatch, I started my first community … to play games with anyone on the internet.

'I don't have a lot of IRL friends that play games,' one Discord user, who goes by Mikeyy on the platform, told me. Its tagline was not subtle: 'It's time to ditch Skype and TeamSpeak.' It had text chat, which was cool, but mostly it did voice chat better than anybody else.Įarly users set up private servers for their friends to play together, and a few enterprising ones set up public ones, looking for new gamer buds. As luck would have it, in early 2015, a new tool called Discord showed up on the market. Their gaming friends were their real friends. They wanted to talk to their gaming friends even when they weren't in a game, and they wanted to talk about things other than games. They mostly hated TeamSpeak and Skype, but they were really the only options.Įventually, a lot of those gamers realized something. They liked playing video games, and liked playing with their friends, so they used TeamSpeak or Skype to talk to their friends in-game.

Most longtime Discord users have a similar origin story.

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