Most of us know what Discord is by now. Personally I’ve been using it since 2018. Everyday I hop on Discord to chat with friends, call & play games together. But how did Discord come to be?
It all started in 2011, when Discord co-founder Jason Citron was working on a gaming company called Hammer & Chisel. While working on the company’s first game, he realized that the existing communication tools were not up to par, and he began developing his own solution.
Did you know? Before Discord many people would use Skype or Microsoft teams to communicate.
In 2012, Citron and his team released Fates Forever, a mobile MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) game that was notable for being one of the first games to use a new communication platform called OpenFeint. This platform allowed players to chat and communicate with each other in real-time, and it was a hit with the gaming community.
However, despite the success of Fates Forever and OpenFeint, Citron and his team decided to move on and focus on developing a standalone communication platform for gamers (A platform that wouldn’t be affiliated with any specific game, community or platform). They named this platform Discord, and in 2015, they released a public alpha version.
These are some snippets from the original homepage:
From the start, Discord was designed to be easy to use and highly customizable. It offered voice, text, and video communication, as well as a wide range of customization options, including custom emotes and server roles. These features, along with Discord’s focus on community and inclusivity, helped it quickly gain a devoted user base. From the start, Discord also had many small advantages against its competitors such as IP & Ddos protection (Ventrillo and Microsoft Teams/Teamspeak only had IP protection. Skype, the most popular didn’t even have IP protection let alone DDOS protection). They had other advantages too such as. In game overlay, Auto Failover, Smart push notifications, Modern text chat, low latency and a free mobile app (Teamspeak/Microsoft teams was the only other to have a mobile app at the time and you needed to pay for it.)
As Discord’s popularity grew, so did the scope of its features. In 2016, the company added screen sharing and streaming capabilities, allowing users to share their screens or streams with others in their server. In 2017, Discord launched Nitro, a subscription service that offered users access to a range of premium features, including the ability to use animated emotes and higher quality screen sharing.
Today, Discord is used by millions of people around the world for everything from gaming to business meetings to socializing. It has become a key part of many online communities, and its popularity shows no signs of slowing down. As a matter of fact, even Cookie Tech uses Discord to have small but meaningful conversations with our community.
I personally am grateful for the creation of this platform as it has become a key part in the things I do on a daily basis. What about you? Do you use Discord? what are some things you’d like to see come to Discord in the future? Let me know!
Thanks for reading!