Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 267 posts

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#111

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #84
SL61 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm gonna have to disagree with you there. Gamers today are not price-averse like they might have been when the gaming demographic was mostly teens. After a peek at your website, I see I'm quite a bit younger than you. I know a lot of people who do not have much money, but they still consider it worth it to spend a chunk of their limited income on Discord Nitro. In some servers I've even seen young teens (13-14) spen…

It's all relative. Gamers are a heck of a lot more price averse than corporations, and the same person is more likely to spend money on a service that helps his/her business than one used for video games.

> Gamers are a heck of a lot more price averse than corporations

Aren’t gaming computers super-high margin?

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#112

Post by nv-vn »

zacharycohn wrote: post #101
crocodiletears wrote: post #66

Discord isn't just for gamers. Though that's where it started, its robust community management features have made it's a go-to for online creators looking to engage with their audiences. It's especially prominent among Youtubers, and is increasingly becoming seen in some circles as a safer alternative to public forums like Reddit for topical discourse. This is, in my opinion because there's no formal discoverability…

> Discord isn't just for gamers. That's true! It's also very popular among neo nazis.

Yep. All 3 of them

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#113

Post by amaranth »

nightski wrote: post #73
dvt wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Building a user base has to be done bottom up. Stores have nothing to do with "user bases." You just want people to buy stuff. As a publisher, you have all the leverage when it comes to pricing arbitrage. You can sell game X on your platform for $45 and sell the same license to Discord for $50. The consumer doesn't care where they buy it from, as long as it's cheaper. Obviously, they're incentivized to buy it on yo…

Sort of. I agree with you that Origin, UPlay and the like have a huge advantage because they actually publish games. But popular storefronts like Steam do have a clause that if you sell it on Steam you can't sell it for cheaper elsewhere. Obviously a new storefront like Discord may not have that kind of power. But who knows.

> if you sell it on Steam you can't sell it for cheaper elsewhere

My understanding is the actual rule is a bit narrower than that. You can't sell _Steam keys_ cheaper elsehwere. If you sell it as a non-Steam game they don't have any input on it.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#114

Post by spdionis »

keerthiko wrote: post #92
pdpi wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Price-averse? There are people literally throwing (digital) money at streamers just for fun, or to troll them, or to get their message announced on stream, or any number of random antics a streamer sets up. The magic of twitch (and league of legends, and a few more) is that this is indeed a very price-sensitive crowd, but one that is willing to engage in a steady stream of frequent capex-style microtransactions whi…

Most of these people also have $5/mo (or 'prime subs' that are free with amazon prime) subscriptions to one or more content creators in the community. I don't even have netflix or spotify or any subscription service, but I find it worth my $5/month to support the one streamer I enjoy tuning in to whenever I want some background entertainment while doing things around the house, and I think that's not an uncommon usec…

It's just that some of the streamers' content is so good that you don't need to pay them, you want to.

It's also about personal connection with a community, which is something that was lacking on the internet after the era of forums died out.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#116

Post by gsich »

orliesaurus wrote: post #79
Pfhreak wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. It's more connected to communities than IRC/Vent/Skype. Right now I hang out in multiple alpha dev game discords, speedrunning discords, a personal game friends discord, a queer gaming discord, and a tabletop game development discord. The degree to which I'm connected to communities is much stronger than in something like IRC or Vent.

I had 30+ TeamSpeak servers in my browse list, I would easily be in 2 or 3 at each one time, but voice would only work in one at a time!

Thank god.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#117

Post by wbl »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #84
SL61 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm gonna have to disagree with you there. Gamers today are not price-averse like they might have been when the gaming demographic was mostly teens. After a peek at your website, I see I'm quite a bit younger than you. I know a lot of people who do not have much money, but they still consider it worth it to spend a chunk of their limited income on Discord Nitro. In some servers I've even seen young teens (13-14) spen…

It's all relative. Gamers are a heck of a lot more price averse than corporations, and the same person is more likely to spend money on a service that helps his/her business than one used for video games.

But a lot more people game then run businesses.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#118

Post by derefr »

ineedasername wrote: post #95
keerthiko wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it targets a price-averse demographic and is attempting to enter spaces that are very saturated This is accurately the current state of affairs, but these are presented like conclusions you make on an industry that's a half century old at least. Gaming was a tiny niche not 15 years ago. It's entered the mainstream less than 10 years ago. It surpassed the film industry not 2 years ago in revenue. Pirated games almos…

"It's entered the mainstream less than 10 years ago. It surpassed the film industry not 2 years" I don't know how you could think this unless you mean something like esports gaming. Gaming has been mainstream for quite some time, as early as the late 80's I'd say, complete with tv show, toy, and movie tie ins. PC gaming was a little less prevalent, they cost a lot more than consoles of the era.

"Mainstream" as in something that you could have a reasonable expectation of having a coherent conversation about with any/every human being on the planet. (For example, "baseball" is relatively mainstream. "The Beatles", or "Elvis", slightly moreso.)

As recently as 15 years ago, a "game console" (home or portable) was mostly something upper-middle-class children owned. 10 years ago, we all got smartphones, and those smartphones got app stores, and suddenly everyone owned a game console (whether they wanted to or not), with a constant stream of games—often free games—coming out for it.

Mario got a movie in the 80s. Pokemon got Thanksgiving day floats in the 90s. But in neither of those cases was everyone playing; everyone was just aware of the brand (mostly because their kids were playing.)

Meanwhile, if you union the sets of people who have played just Candy Crush, Minecraft, and Fortnite at this point, it's probably something like half the global population. Gaming really did "blow up" in the last decade.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#119

Post by gsich »

nightski wrote: post #73
dvt wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Building a user base has to be done bottom up. Stores have nothing to do with "user bases." You just want people to buy stuff. As a publisher, you have all the leverage when it comes to pricing arbitrage. You can sell game X on your platform for $45 and sell the same license to Discord for $50. The consumer doesn't care where they buy it from, as long as it's cheaper. Obviously, they're incentivized to buy it on yo…

Sort of. I agree with you that Origin, UPlay and the like have a huge advantage because they actually publish games. But popular storefronts like Steam do have a clause that if you sell it on Steam you can't sell it for cheaper elsewhere. Obviously a new storefront like Discord may not have that kind of power. But who knows.

Yet this happens all the time. So I'm not sure if Steam has such a clause.

Re: Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

#120

Post by Insanity »

manigandham wrote: post #97
Insanity wrote: post #86

What I find quite strange in Discord (gamers) vs Slack (business/software) is that Discord has syntax highlighting in code snippets, but Slack does not..

Slack does do syntax highlighting. Enter a code snippet and select the language.

Yeah but not inline with the backticks*

Which I find more convenient for small pieces of code rather than making a snippet.

Post reply on HN