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Discord raises $150M, surpassing $2B valuation

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

#161

Post by ineedasername »

scrollaway wrote: post #138
freddie_mercury wrote: post #130

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.) 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.

I don't know what bar you're using for "mainstream", but if it doesn't include videogames in the late 80's/early 90's, it's too high. If being more popular than any other single toy short of a ball isn't mainstream, nothing is. Sure, they're even more popular now, and they may be more popular still in some areas of the world, but that doesn't make them not mainstream 25 years ago.

as reference, according to wiktionary, mainstream is Used or accepted broadly rather than by small portions of a population or market. I think that definition can encompass 40,000,000 households owning consoles.

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

#162

Post by dillondoyle »

legionof7 wrote: post #139

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 switche…

Unless they need to read the content of messages for advertising

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

#163

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#164

Post by ineedasername »

buckysock wrote: post #149
nostrademons wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

it pre-dates that book; ancient Rome had their panem et circenses

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

#165

Post by freddie_mercury »

ineedasername wrote: post #161
scrollaway wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know what bar you're using for "mainstream", but if it doesn't include videogames in the late 80's/early 90's, it's too high. If being more popular than any other single toy short of a ball isn't mainstream, nothing is. Sure, they're even more popular now, and they may be more popular still in some areas of the world, but that doesn't make them not mainstream 25 years ago. as reference, according to wiktionar…

To add to this: Skyrim sold 30 million copies. That's more than all but 7 music albums ever made.

Wii Sports (12 years old) sold 80 million copies. That's more than any album ever.

Individual videogames regularly sell more than MUSIC and have done so for well over a decade.

I don't know what definition of mainstream there is where something sells 80 million copies and still isn't mainstream.

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

#166

Post by PSZD »

dvt wrote: post #22
Pfhreak wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord, however, is a bit of a lifestyle brand like Twitch. It's where conversations happen, and it's incredibly useful to the gaming community. If they can get even a toehold with their subscription services and store, I think they have a very serious chance of turning towards something valuable.

Discord is as valuable to the gaming community as IRC was, or as Ventrilo was, or as Skype was (for a while). In other words, not very (as all those tools were easily replaced). Twitch built a marketplace of creators and consumers (like YouTube) -- that's why it's hard to replace. Discord, on the other hand, is a chat program.

All of those were a pain in the ass for one reason or another, Discord caught on like wildfire because it was a huge step up from what existed. Pretty much a combination of the best parts of IRC + Teamspeak + Skype.

You don't think Discord has any lockin? For a lot of games, coordinating voice chat these days is "paste a discord server invite in chat". Pretty much any guild/clan/subreddit/group/whatever has a Discord (apart from ones with really old TS servers etc), so if you're in one of those, you probably have Discord. Much easier than negotiating Skype/Mumble/TS3.

I'd say Valve/Steam is feeling a lot more pressure these days than Discord.

I'm not sure Discord will ever be a hugely valuable company, but judging by the fact that every launcher in existence (Steam, Battle.net) is trying to clone their features, I'm sure they can at least sell it for quite a bit.

I was really expecting them to push out of the gaming niche, but with the store it looks like they're doubling down on that angle.

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

#167

Post by callalex »

dyarosla wrote: post #128
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…

Amazon bought Twitch for $1B I believe, not $2B. How accurate are the the other figures you cited? If possible, please do provide links for figures you cite- it’s incredibly useful.

The irony of complaining about a lack of sources without sourcing your own claim seems to be lost on you. Here, I did the work for you:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-buys-twitch-2014-8

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

#168

Post by callalex »

hnauz wrote: post #38
bobbygoodlatte wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure gamers are a price-averse demographic

They are, that's why Fortnite took a massive dump on PUBG

Well, that and the fact that two years after the game released it can only run on the most premium hardware because they never paid down their tech debt.

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

#169

Post by callalex »

trevyn wrote: post #109
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…

I feel like if Discord had a default white theme and took out the gaming-specific references, it could easily be a better choice for business comms than Slack.

They would also have to completely overhaul their permissions system, as it is extremely complicated and ACL based, whereas slack has much easier to grasp concepts of private channels and public channels, which is fine in the business world.

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

#170

Post by derefr »

ineedasername wrote: post #158
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…

15 years ago, a "game console" (home or portable) was mostly something upper-middle-class children owned No. Unless you're talking about a country other than the US, this is absolutely incorrect. Original Playstation sold more than 40,000,000 units in the U.S., and in the same console generation N64 sold another 20,000,000. On the portable front, the original Gameboy & Color version, beginning in 1989, sold more than…

> This is not out of reach for even poorer households.

My point with that statement was more about the image than the reality. Go back to 2002, and ask a legislator—or any childless 40-year-old—"who plays video games." That's the answer they'd give. Yuppies. Children of yuppies. (Then the XBOX hit and it became "college-student yuppies and urban youth." No market shift happened in reality; it was just advertising causing a change in perceived image of gaming as a hobby.)

> households

I really think "households" is a bad way to measure anything about gaming, because the particular way that gaming wasn't mainstream in the 1970s-2000s (besides older people just never having experienced it) was that it was incredibly male-coded.

In 2003, a girl sitting around playing GBA games was still considered to be doing something "tomboyish." It wasn't until the release of the Nintendo DS in 2004 that there was any large-scale availability of games specifically targeted at female demographics. All the home consoles were advertised at boys, and mostly had games for boys (that being the explicit localization strategy of the American branches of Nintendo and Sega through the 90s; it began changing by the early 2000s partly due to the influence of Sony, partly the diminishment of Sega, and partly the reining-in of NoA by Nintendo Japan.)

PC games were more gender-neutral (because PCs weren't advertised at kids to begin with, but in homes as a side-effect of parental usage), but AAA releases targeted at girls were still few and far between. There was... The Sims? That's all I can think of. When I ask the women I know about the games they played in that era—of their own volition, rather than because someone handed them a controller—the only other one they tend to name is Myst. Oh, and DDR, but DDR seemingly wasn't really "a video game" in their minds, in the sense that made them think of themselves as "the type of person who plays video games."

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