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Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

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

#141

Post by shanghaiaway »

dvt wrote: post #108
shanghaiaway wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. Stores need traffic, which is why they locate on shopping streets, in large malls, offer large discounts at times and use loss leader products, and buy advertising. Discords user base is traffic.

> Wrong. Stores need traffic... That's incredibly reductive. Not all traffic is created equally. Reddit, for example, is notorious for providing awful bang for your ad buck[1]. > Discords user base is traffic. Oh, I see, so Facebook and Google should've started online stores because of.. traffic? Of course not. If you build a (big enough) platform for free, one of the few viable ways to monetize is to do ads. Making…

This is just a bunch of random points added together. You have the confidence of someone fully ignorant of the subject matter.

The equation is relatively simple. Out of everyone that visits your online store, a small % will make a purchase. You can can both optimize quality and quantity of traffic. For traffic, you need to keep it coming every day, through out the year. Discord has that returning traffic/users. Game publishers do not.

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

#142

Post by tinco »

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?

Prebuilt maybe have some nice margin, but I don't know any gamers who haven't bought their PC custom, or assembled by the retailer. Those have very thin margins, both component manufacturers and retailers have very stiff competition.

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

#143

Post by Eric_WVGG »

derefr wrote: post #118
ineedasername wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

"By mid-1986, 19% (6.5 million) of Japanese households owned a Famicom;[12] one third by mid-1988.[35] By 1990, 30% of American households had the NES". ~ 90 million households in the United states in 1990, which suggests that if you didn't have a NES, you probably had one or more friends who did, and were probably hanging out at their place all the time. That sounds pretty mainstream to me.

(contemporary example: Taylor Swift is decidedly mainstream. Does everyone listen to Taylor Swift? No. At best half of teens and twenty-somethings and drops off going through olders. Does everyone know someone who listens to Taylor Swift? Pretty much.)

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

#145

Post by dvt »

shanghaiaway wrote: post #141
dvt wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wrong. Stores need traffic... That's incredibly reductive. Not all traffic is created equally. Reddit, for example, is notorious for providing awful bang for your ad buck[1]. > Discords user base is traffic. Oh, I see, so Facebook and Google should've started online stores because of.. traffic? Of course not. If you build a (big enough) platform for free, one of the few viable ways to monetize is to do ads. Making…

This is just a bunch of random points added together. You have the confidence of someone fully ignorant of the subject matter. The equation is relatively simple. Out of everyone that visits your online store, a small % will make a purchase. You can can both optimize quality and quantity of traffic. For traffic, you need to keep it coming every day, through out the year. Discord has that returning traffic/users. Game…

I think you’re confused. Ubisoft, Epic, Bethesda, etc. all have launchers/storefronts that people need to use to play their games. Saying they don’t have “traffic” is nonsensical.

(But as I mentioned previously, and you brushed off, traffic alone is an awful metric anyway.)

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

#146

Post by tenryuu »

devwastaken wrote: post #132

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…

Steam holds messages for the past two weeks, you can see these messages I the support tools. GDPR complaincy

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

#148

Post by fipple »

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.

There are different levels of “mainstream.” I talk to my nephew and games like Minecraft / Fortnite / FIFA and Twitch have the mindshare of a 13 year old boy that they categorically did not have 10 years ago. I ask him what he does with his friends and it all revolves around this stuff. They’re not even chasing girls!

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

#149

Post by buckysock »

nostrademons wrote: post #125
ineedasername wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

When I was in middle/high school in the mid-late 90s, I was addicted to the precursors of today MMORPGs (back when everything was text-based), and my career plan consisted of founding a gaming company. My mother successfully (for a time) dissuaded me, saying "Who has time to play games? Once you have money to pay for games, you'll be working at a job for most of your waking hours." A couple years out of college, I ac…

Huxley : soma soma soma

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

#150

Post by cthalupa »

Discord is in this weird situation where they've been massively successful at some specific things that people aren't willing to spend money on, and not, as best as I can tell, anywhere else.

They're absolutely the community chat tool of choice these days - just about every subreddit you go to, every fandom you could ever think of, has a discord community. It's incredibly easy to put one together.

But things like Nitro seem to have minimal adoption. The game store isn't particularly compelling. They've got some partnerships with games where they offer Discord up as the actual in-game voice communication, but I haven't seen much adoption of that, and I don't know if it actually results in revenue for them, either.

It's not unique - we've seen plenty of major tech companies in similar spots - but they've basically all pivoted to advertisements as a way to make money, something that Discord has categorically said they don't want to do. I don't know what they could do to really turn things around here.

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