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Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

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

#131

Post by devonkim »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #111
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

At retail prices but I’ve never known anyone besides rich people or rich grandparents that can afford to spend $2500+ (video cards are well above $600 for high end and the other components at retail tend to get inflated similar to how Apple pads their SKUs around) so a teen can mess around playing games (mostly looking at it from the lens of how I was raised and the attitudes of my elders as well as my non-nerd friends). The usual ignorant gift giver would have bought a console or something towards the console like games or an online subscription.

The areas usually where margins come from are:

1. Skimping on PSU quality 2. Reduced motherboard features 3. Adding LEDs as a “value add” (why earlier this year RAM with LEDs we’re going on sale ahead of the non-LED RAM)

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

#132

Post by devwastaken »

As much as I want something like discord to succeed, it throws all cautions to the wind with user data. There is rentention in two databases of every chat message sent. If somebody ever gets access they could crawl all their info and learn most of their private life through it.

Steam on the other hand will not retain more than 5ish of the last messages.

I'd say it's fine aslong as users could set a duration for their messages automatically, but Discord doesn't even have a mass deletion option. Their API has been Incapable of mass deletion further than 2 weeks.

I have no doubt there will be some major leaks in the future that ruin someone's life.

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

#133

Post by ThomPete »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #130
derefr wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> "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.) This doesn't strike me as a useful definition of mainstream. I live in Vietnam and I guarantee you that no one here could tell you a single thing about baseball, The…

Games became mainstream within the last 20 years or so.

It wasnt mainstream in the 90’ies which is where i predicted that one say you would be able to score girls by being a famous gamer.

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

#134

Post by Wowfunhappy »

wbl wrote: post #117
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Slack charges per person, not per business.

At least, they do for the plans I'm familiar with. I don't know what Slack's giant enterprise agreements are like, but I imagine they're still getting paid plenty per-user.

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

#135

Post by Wowfunhappy »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #111
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That depends a great deal on the part, and—again—what is "high" relative to other products. nVidia's Quadro cards have much higher margins than the models targeting gamers.

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

#136

Post by ekianjo »

keerthiko wrote: post #57
dvt wrote: post #16

I'm bearish on Discord. Unlike Slack, it targets a price-averse demographic and is attempting to enter spaces that are very saturated (Steam, Origin, Epic, Ubisoft are already crushing the digital distribution medium), so then it's basically an IRC replacement for gamers. I understand Slack's valuation as it targets huge companies with up to decades-long contracts and has projected revenues > $1B for this year, but I…

> 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…

> entered the mainstream less than 10 years ago.

Erm, Ever heard of the Sony Playstation? That was more than 20 years ago. You better recheck your timeline.

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

#137

Post by legionof7 »

elefanten wrote: post #123
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…

Do you know of any comparison between use of Discord and Slack for these kind of community management use cases? Is either one used more and what are the relevant feature differences?

I wrote this blog post a while ago for my now-defunct startup. https://medium.com/ardentunited/why-we-use-discord-and-not-s...

(I think the blog post is more popular than the startup by now!)

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

#138

Post by scrollaway »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #130
derefr wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> "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.) This doesn't strike me as a useful definition of mainstream. I live in Vietnam and I guarantee you that no one here could tell you a single thing about baseball, The…

You're not wrong, but that doesn't change the definition of mainstream. It's just a location-sensitive comparison.

For a preview of what video games being "mainstream" looks like: South Korea. It's not unthinkable we could get there in the west.

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

#139

Post by legionof7 »

I've used Discord for a long time and my previous startup was even part of the Hypesquad program. However, I'm really concerned with their views around E2E encryption. We've asked many times for an end-to-end encryption service. This became the #3 most upvoted request (https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600...). Unfortunately, their "rejection" and user comments were deleted after they switched feature request systems.

It was something along the lines of "we take security seriously but we won't do this." IMO, it's pretty important for them to actually consider implementing this.

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