Comment on Game developers desperate for you to join their Discord "server"
Tattorack@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I know this is very unpopular, but something like Discord is very much preferable for real-time conversations than a forum. The interactions with developers and players is a lot more natural, and having a voice chat is always nice.
Discord can also have separate chat rooms about specific issues that can be tagged and searched.
So the functionality of discord is second to none. The only real issue with discord is enshitification. It is very enshitified, and the only way to mostly circumvent that is to have a custom discord client.
If only Matrix was as fully-functional and easy to install and use with just a click.
But it’s all hidden. It’s not searchable or discoverable. I have zero desire to join or be part of discord. It’s like a hidden part of the internet.
If you want to talk about your game put it out in public. You can have a web page a forum and a chat without that stupid shit that is discord.
See a Discord for people to talk about. The game is an entirely different use case than what you’re talking about here.
You’re talking about a place for suggestions and help which can be driven to something like discourse. Which is a platform specifically made for q&A. But it is not well suited for the type of interaction you would expect in a Discord server. It’s not providing the controls and integration that Discord provides, nor is it providing voice chat capabilities and cross interaction.
Discord as much as we all hate it. For the enshitification. is a well-established high population low friction platform for community engagement.
And one of the number one rules when it comes to community engagement is that you go to where your community has the least amount of friction. They don’t come to you.
If that was a community that preferentially used IRC then the developer should preferentially use IRC. Unfortunately, Target gaming audiences preferentially use Discord and are already familiar with the platform. Anything else is adding friction that reduces community growth.
These are the facts of the matter. I’m not saying these in support of Discord. It’s kind of a shitty situation
But you could have all of this on your own page. You could run a chat there. You could have forums there.
Discord is friction. You have to join. You have to put up with the shttiest interface. You can’t search and find anything in it if you are not on it.
A game maker that says cone to my discord is going to piss me off and make me not interested in their game.
I am not going to want to join things to find out about them.
And by the way, I really don’t want to talk to anyone about a game, I want to search for issues or report them and move on.
Its a game not an online live discussion
Yeah, and for every dozen hours spent on building a “shitty discord” that’s a dozen hours not spent building the game.
And then there’s the high friction. Now people need to sign up for your special website, sign up for your special chat, add another app to their phone if you even provide one…etc When 9/10 of those same people already have a Discord account and are already active on Discord.
You don’t appear to understand what friction means. Because using an established platform that the majority of your community already uses isn’t high friction…
It doesn’t matter what the platform is. You bring yourself to the platform your users use. It just so happens that at this point in time it is Discord and this wasn’t always the case and it won’t always be the case.
Discord isn’t friction as most developers and gamers use Discord regularly. You refusing to use Discord makes you a tiny minority. So it’s friction for you, and you personally.
These same people want an online live discussion about the issues in the game. This again makes you part of a tiny minority that doesn’t want that.
Since you’re part of a minority, developers lose nothing by your lack of interest in the Discord community they’ve created. A game certainly won’t fail if you choose to ignore Discord. Rather, a game is likely to fail if there doesn’t exist any Discord community for it.
People don’t want to spend time hosting and managing a forum, they want to make a game
I’m with you. I actually like discord.
enjoy it. its a great platform to communicate with your friends in game on.
but its not a place for tech support, breaking announcements, etc etc etc
It is if you want to use it for that.
If everyone that cares about your game is already there, it’s much simpler to use Discord to drop an announcement.
Refusing to acknowledge others opinions by just saying it’s a “you problem” when you disagree is really not conducive to a conversation by the way.
The interactions with developers and players
I don’t want to have interactions with developers, nor other players. Cramming “social media” above the game advertisement itself is… something.
That’s a you problem. Most gamers and developers do want those things and every thriving game I can think of has a very active Discord community.
charles@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
In my opinion, the biggest issue with pushing communities to Discord is that it traps the information within that platform and their search leaves a lot to be desired.
Discord is a good platform to build a community around a topic, however, more often than not, a lot of solutions to common problems become lost or hard to find for new players/users.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 3 days ago
discord is a communication platform for friends to game on. nothing more, nothing less.
It should not be an information archive.
It should not be a source of tech support.
It shouldnt be a source of important news/announcements.
All that shit should be on your fucking website, where it can be indexed, archived, and searched for.
Cause discord isolates information in such a way that you will never be able to find out unless you actively use discord, actively hunt down the right discord channel, and properly luck into finding the information.
verses just going to a web browser and typing " [game name] [bug description]" and likely getting the solution, or at least relevant information, in the first 3 returns.
Discord holds information hostage, and kills it should a channel shut down/delete, losing it forever… and anyone that has played older games know that some of that information and community fixing is essential, even a decade+ later.
Tattorack@lemmy.world 3 days ago
It’s only trapped on Discord if one refuses to ever join Discord. Most people playing games use Discord, so that’s not a real issue for them.
Making things searchable, such as problems and solutions, is dependent on how well managed a community is; over the years I’ve had plenty of issues trying to find something on a forum simply because something like keywords, and tagging didn’t exist or wasn’t enforced, or bug reports were regelated to a single forum thread.
The same it is with Discord. If you’re smart you’ll create a “forum” channel for bug and issue reports and force users to use tags as a rule.
charles@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Funnily enough, I actually don’t dislike discord as a platform, I’ve even built servers that have grown to hundreds and thousands of users. I’m also well aware of the attempts discord has made at rectifying the issues I outlined. That being said, it is absolutely a walled-garden and whenever discord’s servers are taken offline, countless amounts of information will go with them. At least with forums or a lot of other platforms, people can easily archive the info, not so much with discord.