Comment on Game developers desperate for you to join their Discord "server"
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 4 days agoBut 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.
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
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
douglasg14b@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Well from every person I asked who uses discord, the last thing they want is to have to deal with game devs on discord. Making a website and chat is so stupid simple, I question g a dev can make a good game if they can’t do that.
Tattorack@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
Yeah I guess. Hiding their game in a proprietary black hole is their business I guess. In a few years their game will be forgotten all discussion lost and no-one will care.
Again, they could have all the same thing on their own site and include live discussions.
But people want shit apparently so here we are.
Evotech@lemmy.world 3 days ago
People don’t want to spend time hosting and managing a forum, they want to make a game