Discord's Platform: Emergence of Generative AI and Community-Driven Development

Discord's platform has enabled developers to build 20,000 activities, generating 4 billion minutes of user interaction per day.

### Discord's Evolution: From Gaming Communication App to Platform Powerhouse
* 🎮 Discord's journey began in 2012 when co-founder and CEO Jason Citron envisioned a communication app for gamers that would **span all platforms and devices**.
* 🛠 The company's history of building tools and infrastructure for games, starting with **OpenFeint in 2009**, laid the foundation for **Discord's extensible platform**.
* 🗣 Discord's community-driven product development approach, with **input from users and developers**, led to **key roadmap shifts and feature expansions**.
* 🤖 The platform's early focus on **extensibility**, with an **open API and SDKs from day one**, enabled developers to create a **wide range of integrations and bots**.
* 🏗 Discord's recent release of **embeddable apps**, allowing developers to build **rich, visual, interactive experiences** powered by HTML5, marks a **new phase of platform expansion**.
* 🌐 The platform's extensibility has led to the emergence of new companies like Mid Journey, which built a **generative AI tool entirely on Discord**.
* 🚀 Looking ahead, Discord aims to support more creative experiences for small, invite-only groups, such as **generative AI tools** and **music bots for private servers**.
* 🎨 In a "jam session" scenario, Citron envisions building multiplayer titles that integrate **storytelling and asynchronous gameplay** within Discord servers.

### Discord's Embedded App SDK: Revolutionizing Social Gaming and AI Development
* 🎮 The launch of Discord's Embedded App SDK has sparked a wave of creativity among developers, with **over 20,000 new activities created in just 3 weeks**, generating **4 billion minutes of user interaction per day**.
* 🌐 Discord's unique social context and massive user base of **200 million users** provide developers with **unparalleled distribution and engagement opportunities**.
* 💡 The platform's **low production costs** and **easy cross-platform integration** enable developers to quickly build and iterate on new experiences, potentially creating **new game genres** and **interactive entertainment formats**.
* 🤖 The combination of Discord's platform with generative AI tools is particularly powerful, enabling developers to **create and refine AI models** in a similar iterative process to game development.
* 💰 Discord is also focusing on helping developers monetize their apps, with features like **in-app purchases and subscriptions** integrated directly into the platform, reducing friction for both **developers and users**.
* 🚀 Discord's success can be attributed to its ability to identify and address the **pain points of users**, making it "**10 times easier**" for people to communicate and engage with their friends.
* 🌟 Looking ahead, Discord aims to further empower developers by providing a **full loop for building sustainable businesses on the platform**, including **app listing, monetization, and re-engagement features**.
* 🎉 The future potential of Discord's Embedded App SDK is vast, with the possibility of creating **entirely new genres of social gaming and AI-driven experiences** that were previously unimaginable.

that's the story of our kind of creative progress as humanity is like people build these tools, which enables the next group of people to focus on a higher level set of problems. Just in the last 3 weeks since launch, developers have built over 20,000 new activities on the platform that's generating 4 billion minutes of us interaction per day. This scale is sort of mindboggling. What's going on I think something like 93% of gen Z plays games where you know back when we were kids it was super weird to be playing games. We're now seeing some really significant examples of companies being built entirely on Discord. Bill Gates once said that a platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it. This definition sets a pretty high bar for the few companies that surpass it, but one company that does come to mind is Discord. What officially started in 2015 can really be traced back to 2009 when Discord co-founder and CEO Jason

Citron started building tools and infrastructure for games. Fast forward to today, and Discord now has over 200 million monthly active users. Some even argue that the metaverse may actually be here. It just doesn't quite look like The Sims. So in today's episode, you'll get to hear from Jason alongside a16z General partner Anrey Mida, who actually sold his company Ubik 36 to Discord in 2021. So what did Discord do differently to build such a thriving platform? They discuss everything from community-driven product development, how Jason himself went from player to developer, and also the focus on extensibility since the very beginning. With Discord's recent release of embeddable apps, what can we expect now that it's easier than ever for developers to build? If I was to go back, you know, when I was in college, which was almost 20 years ago now, like none of that stuff existed. And it was like, you know, firing up C++ and and like reading the DirectX APIs and spending a week.

trying to get a window to open with a triangle on it as a reminder. The content here is for informational purposes only. Should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a6z fund. Please note that a6z and its Affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a1.com disclosures. I'm so excited. Thank you for joining us, Jason Citran, CEO of Discord, former colleague, current friend, and the person who I know who's start tried to start game studios the most number of times and ended up building insanely successful platforms along the way. Today we're going to talk about all kinds of things, um, focused on developers, infrastructure, the future of the Discord platform, but before we get to that, maybe for folks who are who might not be as familiar with the crazy story that led to here, why don't we go back in history.

let's start at the very beginning. What was the vision for Discord when you first started out? Yeah, so way back in 2012, um, I was sitting around trying to think about what could be an exciting business to build. And um, having spent most of my career, in fact all of my career and my childhood, steeped in video games and multiplayer games, I had this hunch that multiplayer gaming and gaming in general was going to become much bigger than it already was at that time. And back in 2012, gaming was pretty big, but it was kind of at the early innings of mobile, um, and still, you know, trying to figure out like where was gaming going to go. And I thought that there'd be an opportunity to build a Communications app for people who play games, uh, that would span, you know, all the platforms and all the devices as gaming would become bigger and more cross-platform. You know, it largely has played out that today in 2024, gaming is the largest form of entertainment.

bigger than music and movies combined growing fast, and uh, people love to play games. It's gone mainstream, I think. Something like 93% of gen Z plays games. Where you know, back when we were kids, it was super weird to be playing games. What were the moments where you, you were playing games, and you went from being a player and a consumer of games as a product, to going, you know what, the tools I'm using here, um, could be better. When you started, what was the moment where you shifted from being a player to developer? Well, I fell in love with games when I was a little kid because they were a way for me to connect and spend quality time with people in my life. You, I remember, um, sitting with my dad. I don't know, I must have been four or five years old. This is like late '80s, um, and he introduced me to this game called Where in the World is Carmen San Diego on his old Packard Bell computer. And I just remember being so excited about being able to sit with my dad and spend

some quality time with him exploring this world and trying to find this crazy lady. And over the years, growing up playing multiplayer games on consoles and then on the internet as that became a thing in the late 90s. And along the way, I met someone who basically was like, yo, I know how to make video games. A friend of mine. I was like 13 at the time. I was like, no, you don't. You can't just make video games. And he was like, no, no, check it out. We went to my computer and he fired up this thing called qbasic and showed me how to draw a circle on the screen. And I was like, oh my God, that's amazing. I could make video games. And so that was kind of when I became an engineer and a programmer and I learned how to code. And then, fast forward, you know, I went to school, grew up, and got into an opportunity where I was able to start a company and through the process.

of building a game on the iPhone. We actually launched a game the day the App Store opened in 2008, one of the first 50 titles on the App Store, and that kind of took off like crazy. As we now know, mobile has been the biggest computing platform in the world, and through that journey, I realized that while I had made a fun game, it was called Aurora Faint, the technology that we had built, which was kind of like leaderboards, chat rooms, login, was something that other developers really wanted. And at the time, many game developers didn't know how to build infrastructure, and I had learned how to do infrastructure and also make games. So we kind of spun out the backend tech and built this social network for mobile gaming. This was probably 2009. It was called OpenFeint. We opened up Aurora Faint. Lesson about branding from that: no one knows how to spell that thing. So that was kind of the first moment when I started building tools and infrastructure for games.

that company did pretty well, and then in 2012, um, after I had kind of moved on from that, uh, started again building another game. But we began as a game Studio as well in 2012 called Hammer and Chisel, and we started as a game because I thought that the path to building the communications app would be to start with a multiplayer game. I had this hunch that core, sort of core long-form gaming was going to come to Mobile in a big way, um, and so we started building a team-based competitive multiplayer game on iPad at the time in 2012, and, uh, one thing led to another. The game didn't really work out, but through the process in late 2014, we started talking about what if we just went to Market directly with the chat app for gaming and, um, my co-founder Stan kind of had the insight for what that concept could look like, and we started building it in January 2015, and then brought it to Market in May 2015. And that was kind of how how it

all started there's a theme emerging here right where at least twice now you you kind of approached building a a product as an application developer. You could think of a game as an app and you discovered along the way that there's a bunch of really hard infrastructure especially when it comes to real-time multiplayer gaming. The history of computing is such that like usually real-time gaming is one of the most demanding infrastructure environments um and then you discovered that there were a ton of infrastructure problems along the way and then you ended up actually building those tools for other people to use and and have since built one of the fastest growing biggest um real-time communication Platforms in the world which is sort of insane to think about you know the scale of Discord but when you kind of play forward from that moment in 2015 when when Discord came out um and and today how has the community on Discord helped shape the road map the people actually using the infrastructure whether those are users or or developers yeah you know our our community our user base has been part of

the kind of conversation of what we're making from the first day you know when we started talking about building Discord. Of course, we played a lot of multiplayer games ourselves so we had a good sense for what the product should be and how it should work. But as anyone who's building a startup knows or building products like you need to make things for people you had you know were building products and service of other people. And so when we showed it to them even just mockups like what parts got them excited which part seemed confusing and very quickly once we got a prototype off the ground we started giving it to our friends and having them try it and seeing what they liked and what they didn't like and oh crap this we had to rebuild you know the voice Tech three times and we you know missed an important set of features that we thought maybe was not important but turns out it was and so that was kind of part of the ethos for how we built it.

know from the beginning, and then over the years, we've continued to build products that way. In a sense, that we always try to come back to what are we hearing from our customers, from our users, and the different types of people who use our products. And then how do we kind of mix that with what we are excited to build for ourselves. And then, of course, you know what do we think will be great for us as a business, because we are a company. So, along the way, there have been many, many, many moments when large shifts have happened in our roadmap because of customers. So, like I'll give you an example. Initially, when we built Discord, it was very focused on being a voice and text chat app for guilds, people who play games in groups of like 15 people. And actually, the max group size on Discord, I think, was like 30 people, maybe 50. It was pretty low. And we realized pretty quickly from talking to people that they

wanted to use Discord as almost like an IRC, like Internet Relay Chat, kind of public chat room replacement. And in that context, what we saw was people were filling their servers up with 50 people, and then they were like, I can't have more people, what's going on? Like, Oh crap, we got to make this work for folks. So we invested in raising the cap and adding more infrastructure to support that. And then, um, and then developers started building moderation bots and extending these Discord servers with other capabilities that we never even imagined. That was made possible because we had an open kind of API powering the platform. So along the way, many of these things happened. Like these communities got big. Um, generative AI became a big thing on Discord. Um, uh, the crypto community was pretty big for a season on Discord. Um, but throughout all of it, gaming and playing games with your friends and hanging out with your friends was always the main thing that people were doing, even if they would go spend time in a public community. Or you

know fussing around with generative AI or something like that. Yeah, I think one of the most underappreciated things about Discord is that the product has found a way to do two things at once that almost no other companies are able to do and businesses and teams are able to do at scale, which is have a singular focus on a particular type of user and their need. In this case, what you said was allowing friends to spend time together while playing games while also making the platform and the product so extensible for other people to bring their own use cases to the platform. I remember seeing the homepage a couple of years ago. I was stalking a Stan and he brought up a screenshot of the first version of the homepage you guys had put together. On the front page on day one, you had a call out for Integrations and SDKs. You had an open API on day one as part of the hero marketing, and so clearly you were

thinking about making the platform extensible for all other kinds of use cases. 10 years ago, where did that come from? And um, can you talk a little bit about the challenges of both building a delightful product for users first, while also maintaining this extensibility for other kinds of use cases that you may not have designed for explicitly? Yeah, the extensibility was built in from the beginning, and it's cool you saw that. That you went back and looked at that. I think if you go to the Wayback machine or the Wayback archive for what it's called, you can find it still. Um, from like 2015, you know, the idea was that we knew that people were going to want to um, build custom integrations with different games as part of thinking about like what's a group chat for gaming look like. So we imagining like an Eve online corporation, which like a group people playing this, you know, outer space and massively multiplayer game or um, you were playing, you know, Final Fantasy um, online, which is a fantasy.

Adventure game. These different games have um things that you might data and and things that you might want to kind of pull into your group chat experience. But we knew we were not going to build all of these things for, you know, the hundreds or thousands of games that people might care about. So that was kind of one thing where like we've got to make it so other folks can integrate their custom stuff from their games into Discord. And then related to that was this insight that I um I had from from just being an observer in the gaming business for so long, which is that in games there's this concept of modding where people can mod games. And what that basically means is people like a developer will create a game and then often times ship with it the tools they use to make the game. I think ID software popularized this in the early days with Doom. It's kind of the first one I really remember getting big. They I think they call them wad files. This whole scene online where you go download wad files.

and and then they started packaging up and selling them and and it added a ton of life to the game and and today now when we look at the top titles that people play a lot of them actually became as be began as community-driven mods like Counterstrike Team Fortress League of Legends GTA you know roll playing um gosh the list just goes on so many of the top game fortnite began you know it's version four of a mod that I think came from a game called Arma 3 many years ago so this idea that like give your community Community tools to create and customize and extend your your your game or your software and they're going to surprise you and take it in places that you never would have expected was just kind of like just to me seemed how like that's how you make good software right so when we built Discord it sort of seemed obvious to us that we wanted to create an API that allowed developers to extend Discord to to be more creative with it to do things with it we never would have um expected

some of the things that we expected were like, you know, connecting to the Eve online, you know, back in so you can have your own Forum, or, or pulling in, you know, World boss spawns into as notifications. But the stuff we never expected was like generative AI, you know, who could, who could have guessed that, right? Yeah, I mean, now we're seeing many years after you made those investments in the craft of designing a delightful API, fantastic tutorials, you know, a great developer experience for people to mod Discord itself. We're now seeing some really significant examples of companies being built entirely on Discord. You know, the Discord platform has 200 million monthly active users, and that's led to entirely new companies being built on top. With the open architecture you described, people may be familiar with mid-journey, and there's a few other ones too. Mid-journey is the most famous one. It's like a canonical example of how this stuff happens. Like we have this open platform where we're allowing people, developers to customize it and extend it.

think the Mid Journey folks had, you know, been working on their model for a while. I think they tried bringing it to market in a few other ways, and then they just tried a Discord server and a Discord bot, and then this was an example of exactly what I was talking about. I never would have predicted that you would have a generative AI in the first place. Like, what a crazy thing that we've created computers that can do these things, and then, two, that someone would figure out how to take advantage of the magic of a Discord server and our platform and build this such a cool experience. And there's, you know, a handful of these now. So, yeah, it's just been a pretty thing to see. Mid Journey is one example of a generative model. It's a text-to-image model tool. We've also seen an explosion of text-to-music tools as an example of how extensible Discord is. What other kinds of use cases are

you seeing emerge on the platform that that you're excited about. Yeah, the generative AI sort of category is exciting for us. But you know, we really come back to this idea of people mostly on Discord spend their time hanging out with their friends in these kind of smaller invite-only spaces with like, you know, less than 15 people per se. So, in that context, when I think about generative AI tools and using our platform, I really think about what are developers creating that give groups of friends more fun things to do. And so, one really cool thing we see with the generative AI stuff is people take the Bots and bring them into their kind of invite-only servers. And then they can use them to create and explore and work on projects with their friends in a more kind of private setting as opposed to being in the sort of the public chaos, frankly, of some of these large servers. But other really cool experiences we see are things like ways to listen to music together.

SoundCloud has a really cool bot that you can use to play music when you're in voice chats. For example, we're working with some other partners to try to bring more music to the platform. There's a bunch of games that people have made that are pretty cool, and many more are coming. You know, we just actually launched a couple weeks ago a new kind of set of capabilities for the platform that will allow developers to go beyond the text box and build these rich, visual, interactive experiences powered by HTML 5. So you could build a web app and essentially deploy it into the context of Discord. And we're seeing lots of really exciting stuff starting to get built. Let's spend a couple minutes on that. This is something you and I spent years working on together. Yes, we did. We did. Let's take people a little bit behind the curtain of like what it took to go from the moment where

we realized that developers wanted to express their creativity beyond just a command-line interface, which was what Bots were initially designed around as a form factor. And the moment and going from there to expanding the entire canvas for them to the whole screen really with web apps. Yeah, well, you know, years ago when our platform started to get popular, there is actually a hack week project at our company. So, we do this thing every year called Hack Week where we basically stop our normal work, and everyone gets together, and we have like a little kind of creativity festival. It's the best way to describe it. And back when I think this year was the I think it was 2018 was the year that I'm thinking about. We actually had like tents in our office. It was like a whole cool kind with food and stuff. And one of the groups that year had the idea of wouldn't it be cool if we added an HTML 5 canvas to our apps.

platform, and then people could like make games and do other interesting stuff. And so, there was a team that built this, and I was like, That's a really cool idea, and we've got to explore that. But as company building goes, you have a long list of ideas, and you have to prioritize when you get to them. So, a couple of years later, the time was right to look at the idea, and that's when we met. You were actually working on your own startup at the time and were kind of building this as a standalone project. And after some conversation, we were like, Man, we should just do this together. So, we acquired your company, and then we created a team and really formalized this idea of how do we take our platform from the text-based era into the visual, rich interactive experience era. Rather than just opening it up, we actually built a few games ourselves to really test the platform, make sure that it was designed well, that it worked for players, that the

interaction loops were good and that you know took a couple years to kind of sort that all out. Now we're at the point where okay, we're ready to open it up. So it's in developer preview. So it's been a journey. It's been a fun journey. Yeah, okay, we're going to go a little bit deeper there. So I remember one of the most exciting parts of working, you know, at Discord was the respect for infrastructure, right? The company had built its own WebRTC streaming service, had built its own voice and video infra, its own real-time comms infra. We built a bunch of serverless networking, and I remember there are these moments in the product engineering cycle when you're building infrastructure that you inevitably have to ask yourself, well, what is this going to be used for? And I remember having debates with you about how to answer that question and prioritize the most important features. And so we came up with this ritual of

jam sessions. If you remember where the team that was working on tools and infra and SDKs for the developers would come in and jam with you. Where you were you were um you would often role-play the developer and you'd come up with ideas for what the what could be possible in the platform. And then you know we'd leave the we'd leave the jam session we'd go back to building the tools in the infra but so today you know fast forward I'm going to ask you to to Pretend We're in a jam session okay um and and I we just launched the activities SDK the embedded apps SDK and now you're a developer um and I'm going to ask you now what would you like to go build with this entirely new set of capabilities that you've been handed by Discord yeah so I guess the way that I think about this is like first if I like what am I going to build I try to think about like what do I as a consumer consumer want right it's almost

like two steps even past the infrastructure. It's like the developers are sort of thinking like they're serving their customers. So you got they have to take their hat off, right, and then put on their consumer hat. And so, you know, for me, it's sort of like, um, start to think about what kind of, you know, games I might want to play and and how they could fit into my Discord servers in fun ways. And, you know, for me, I really would love someone to build, um, some like multiplayer titles that don't require a lot of time investment but have, um, sort of really cool moments of storytelling that you can interact with your friends asynchronously around. That sort of weaves into the Discord experience through text and with the visuals as well. I I have like a small side project I'm working on right now, which is a game kind of like this. It's like a, it's like an arcade shooter that has kind of a leaderboard mechanic but with sort of like a modern kind of roguelike vibe on.

it anyway random stuff that I'm making as a side both to to sort of dog food and test our platform and but part of this is how I get myself in the mind space of like what do our developers want what might their customers want so that I can give good feedback to our team who is also doing this um so we can serve people effectively you know one of the things that I think you've always been pretty good at doing is asking the question of what is possible on on Discord that isn't possible elsewhere and you're often able to laser in and hone in on these specific capabilities that are ultimately technology sort of technical Computing Primitives but exposed to users in a way that allows them to do something with their friends they couldn't do before in a way that's easier or faster or better or more convenient and that's you know that's how things like um persistent stage channels happened right and that's how forum channels happened and that's how the embedded app SDK happened and so as

you're working and crafting your side project right now. Um, what in your mind are the top two or three things that the Discord and embedded platform that you just launched really shines at that's hard to do elsewhere? MH the magic I think is the fact that you have the social context of the space you're in, right? So, it's really, really easy for someone to pick up a title and then that game can depend on the fact that there's a group of people that are connected to the person playing it, and you have access to that data in a privacy-safe way, right? Unlike, let's say, other games where maybe you log in or you get a user to come into your game and then you have to get them to maybe build a friends list or to invite their friends to play. In the context of Discord, because of the way the games work, they're instant and they have the social context. You could build a game loop where one person plays and then immediately the result of that play session is other people get exposed to

the game you know, and they can play it, and they don't have to like go do anything to be able to really set that up because the friend brought it into the server, right? So I think about cool mechanics like leaderboards and challenges, and these kind of things that really, really depend on having this group of people that have access to this shared space both synchronously, right, and then also on the go in bite-sized ways. So it's, it's this like it's a different kind of interaction model. Um, so I could open my phone, you know, uh, play game, and then when I get back to my computer, I could pick it up, and then you could play from your phone when you're somewhere else if you want to come and compete with me when you have a few minutes in your SP time. So I, I think this, this is the kind of model that I'm playing around with with this title, um, but part of what I'm so excited about with these tools is it's really is to see the creativity.

that other people bring, you know, like I know what would be interesting to me, but much like when we designed the platform for Discord in the beginning, so many of the cool things that happened with it, I would never have predicted, right? So I'm most excited to see what people do that I don't even think about. Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's worth taking a beat there to just recap what you just said up until now. For a developer to build a cross-platform experience like that, it takes yours, and the end result, I think, is what you're describing, is that a product or an app, whether it's a game like the one you're building or an app like mid-Journey, can literally go from zero to, I think mid-Journey is now at more than 20 million users in the server or about there. Yeah, I think their public server is, yeah, it's about that size, it's pretty large. Okay, there we go, you know, in about, essentially, you know, less than a year. Yeah, right, yeah, it's.

yeah, it's a, you should write the marketing brief for, yes, I mean, you did, I guess you actually did, um, I mean, you're spot on, you know, I mean, I think that's what's so magical about it, is, you know, the trends that the, that, that entertainment and gaming in particular have been on for the last decade are, uh, cross-platform, you know, like people are more and more expecting games to not be tethered to devices, it's just a screen, like you should be able to switch screens and play the same experience, you want your content and your, your progress to go across those screens, you want your friends and your social graph to go across those screens, you want the things you bought to go across those screens, right, and you know these trends are happening sort of in the world broadly, um, in gaming too, but what we're trying to do is, is really kind of package that all together in a really easy to pick up way, right, where not only are the, are do the games have all those things, but we

also, you know, bring the social graph with the G, you know, to the game. We manage off for you because it's built into Discord, right? It gets deployed on every platform that we're on, which is most of them. We have payments built in on the platforms where the platforms don't, and you know, Discovery and all this stuff. So, um, yeah, I'm just excited to see what people can make, you know, that's the story of our kind of creative progress as humanity is like people build these tools, which enables the next group of people to focus on a higher level set of problems, right? So, you know, we've abstracted out some of this infrastructure for folks so people can spend more time on their gameplay and the creativity of that than, you know, fussing around with oth and building social graphs and all this kind of stuff. And, you know, one of the com one of the most amazing things about building an open architecture is that you get the combinatorial creativity, the explosion of your Primitives your

platform with other tools that may be coming online or maturing at that moment in time. And sitting here in 2024, if you're just contrasted to the version of Jason in college who was building his own games, right, and you hand him both all the open infra of Discord's developer platform and the recent kind of explosion in these creative generative models that can allow you to turn text into images and text into audio, and allow code generation and so on. When you look at those, how the production pipeline of building an entire experience like a game has changed with generative models, and then you combine that with the Lego blocks of Discord, what are the kinds of new game formats or new types of interactive entertainment that you think are possible today that just weren't possible maybe when you were in college? Yeah, I mean there's so much that has changed, it's kind of amazing. Like you think about it, and today, you know, between the, like you said, the generative AI tools, social and distribution

infrastructure like app stores, and something like Discord, right? Plus like the modern game engines, you know, like we can't leave that, leave those out. Like the kind of game engine you can get off the shelf today, whether it's Unity, Unreal, GDAU, Phaser, all these things, they're just incredible. I mean, if I was to go back, you know, when I was in college, which was almost 20 years ago now, um, like none of that stuff existed. If you want, you know, I mean, I built games back then, and it was like, you know, firing up C++ and and like reading the DirectX APIs and spending a week trying to get a window to open with a triangle on it. Like I think what ends up happening is because people can be so much more productive and the markets are so much bigger, right? You can, you get into, I think we're going to start to see more and more games that are um, focused on more and more kind of niche um, topics and and niche mechanics because if you think about it like big

games get big budgets so they tend to be less risky, right? Smaller games can be more risky because the budget dynamics are. So you could imagine a world where, like, you know, one developer could build an entire game like Stardew Valley, which was one developer, but I think it took him like five or six years. You know, the next Stardew Valley might be built by one guy in a year. And if you imagine what that means is, you may get 10 Stardew Valleys, and they may all have different themes and topics. So we may all just get like more entertainment that's customized to our particular, like, sort of proclivities because so many more people are making games. And so the cost is down, and then the markets are bigger. So there's more people than ever who are looking for this stuff. Yeah, this is also, I think, one of the most underappreciated parts of Discord, right, which is it has unlocked, paradoxically, niche at scale through the server context. There are now thousands and thousands of

Niche communities on Discord who have then found um people who love each of those niches globally MH. And what always struck me when we were looking at these at the activity in these servers and what kinds of apps and and Bots they were using is um the extensibility of the platform allows those niches to do things with the platform and build a bot or an app that's custom designed for that Niche community's use case. I think there's one you told me about a while ago um which was the Harry Potter fanfiction server right which had an app that that Community had built for the friends who are huge Harry Potter fans um to roleplay being at Hogwarts if you remember that one. Yeah yeah yeah yeah so you know if I'm asking you to channel your like inner will right for example you know one of the most successful game genres of all time has been simulation right. The Sims all the Tycoon games that allow people uh to express this um this worldbuilding desire where they're they're able to um almost use games as a

tool for creativity where the game is itself building and creating um with other people. Roblox, of course, say has done a phenomenal job at at doing that in in a presort of gener of AI World Minecraft, right. So if you there's Minecraft, Roblox, there's the Sims. If given how massive those genres were in a pregenerative world when you when you give the generative models to a developer plus the insane distribution of Discord, 200 million people on day one, um, do you think we're going to see a new kind of genre there of of something that blends um simulation with real life. These things are really hard to predict, you know, and as as an as someone who makes, you know, more on the tools side of things, you know what I think is definitely going to happen is that because it's going to be so so much easier to create, we're going to see more random stuff. So the chances of something interesting happening, I think, are going up, but like the things that sort of cause new kinds of game

genres to emerge are often times changes in distribution business model or production capabilities right and and and so I think in this moment we're seeing some of these things change like Discord is offering a different kind of distribution mechanism um with with different context um generative AI is definitely changing the landscape for how people produce games today um and so I think that I think that it's you know we're probably going to see something interesting happen this is the most fun part of working on dev platforms right you you get surprised yeah yeah you know the Discord team finally launched in full General availability um after years of crafting and honing the the developer experience the embedded app SDK on March 18 and if I get my if I have my numbers right just in the last 3 weeks since launch developers have built over 20,000 new activities on the platform that are and that's generating four billion minutes of user interaction per day this scale is sort of Mind Bing what's going on why is this resonating so so like

strongly right now. And what are the top emergent behaviors you're seeing in the first few weeks? Yeah, well, I think it's resonating because developers intuitively understand a lot of stuff we've been talking about. They're looking for distribution channels with captive audiences on the other side with low production cost that they can, you know, so they can explore their own creativity and build products for themselves and their friends and bring those to market. And, you know, the games industry, I think, is in an interesting situation right now, in particular. So, the new channel, you know, we thought people were going to be excited about it. And then at Game Developers Conference a couple of weeks ago when we announced it, I was actually surprised how much people, how much it resonated with developers. You know, we had a couple of talks there and the lines were like out the door. So, you know, as far as like what people are building, you know, a lot of the things that I know folks are working on have

not actually released yet since that since since we opened that up so I I don't want to to to say anything that hasn't come to market yet but um I think the the that 20,000 number sounds big and it's exciting but but I think in reality there's um it what it signals to me is a lot of excitement and curiosity and we'll sort of see you know how many of those come to Market and what that'll be. I suspect that there are probably you know 20,000 people poking around. I think there's thousands of them that are like actually really making something and so you know I expect we'll probably see hundreds of those things come to Market over the next six or eight months um but without getting into specific some of them are like interesting new ways to stream games and some of them are new games and some of them are just interactive experiences like ways to enjoy different types of entertainment together and some of them are like silly things like comic book related you know.

projects, and then there's a lot of stuff in there that I haven't actually seen because there's so much. Uh, you know, I was talking to a developer at GDC who is working on, um, on a Discord embedded activity that is tinkering with some of these new generative models that you were describing. And one of the things he crystallized for me, which, you know, I think kind of maps the experience we had in the early days of mid-Journey, you know, launching on the platform, was this idea that game development and sort of AI app development have this very, uh, this very strong similarity in the development process, which is: you pre-train a model, and then you put it out with your community. And then what the community does with the early days of the model and what outputs of the model they prefer helps you then sort of run a reinforcement learning loop to then improve the model at giving your users what they like. And that's very similar to the game sort of process.

right where you put out a soft launch title, usually with live ops in in soft launch, and then you start seeing which parts of the multiplayer experience your community likes, and then you you basically pipe that into future live ops releases, right? Um, if you had to describe why why the Discord platform has found so much success with generative AI developers, is there fundamentally something similar about the game development production process and AI app development that that is so similar that that's resulted in you know Discord basically hosting the world's most successful consumer AI business right now, which is which is mid Journey, both of those things make sense, but I actually think if you zoom out a little bit, there's there's another interesting Trend that this is kind of part of, which I think is this idea of consumers wanting to be closer to the people creating the things that they use in their lives, and it's actually kind of a broader, I think, Dynamic of co-creation with consumers as you're Building Products, right? So, I I think in in the

case of AI, there's quite literally like a direct feedback loop where I think a lot of these models are using, you know, thumbs up and thumbs down type reactions on the outputs to directly feedback and improve. Um, the model. And in the, in the case of games, it's a little more, it's like a little one-step remove where perhaps the players were talking with the developers and they're using the products and they're giving them feedback. And I know a lot of devs use Discord to do early playtest and they hop on voice chat and they show off builds and they spend time with their with their users. But I also hear just like startups doing it and other companies doing that too, not just games. I think the, you know, gaming and AI is kind of at the forefront of this, but we see lots of other tools. Um, there's like a command line app that I use as an engineer, um, uh, called Warp that has a Discord server and they hang out with their community in there and talk about

feature improvements and how to make their product better. And like it just goes on and on and on. And so it's, I think, the trend is actually that consumers want to have say and influence over the products they build. And it actually turns out as a product Creator, having that direct line of feedback with a tight feedback loop with your early adopters, really helps you shape what you're building and make it better. So, it ends up being, I think, this really powerful kind of back and forth, right, where you can improve your product, people get excited about it, you build evangelists, and then when you do go to market and sort of launch, you have this sort of built-in Community energy that can help spread the word around. And sometimes those things will lead into like kickstarters, patreons, and other stuff. So, there's this whole sort of like community-driven product development thing that I think Discord is part of or maybe helping Drive in some way, but it's another one of those interesting emergent things you

know coming back to the topic of like you build these platforms and these tools with something in mind and then other interesting things can happen with it. You know, we again, we really started focused on being a place for people to come together and play games with their friends, and that is still the bulk of what people do today. But all these other interesting things happen, like companies setting up servers to do C- development with their consumers. It's like, wow, that's super cool. Yeah, there's this company that I have the chance to work with as an investor called Luma. It's a generative AI model that allows people to create 3D assets, and before they even had a website or a mobile app, they launched as a Discord app. And I think what that resulted in was like, I think in three or four days, they had 34,000 people in the community show up, half of whom were from the games industry and half who weren't, and started using the model in

ways that they didn't expect and allowed them to realize that there was a much broader set of uses for their tool. And then that began a dialectic that allowed them to then change the focus or tweak the priority of what the list priorities on in their product development road map. Then ship that to that Discord user base and what I when I saw that happening I realized you know there's this art in in software development of finding product Market fit early on. Right, we used to talk about this concept if you remember of the highest expectation user, yeah, the hxc and it is remarkably hard to find hxc uh to take time out the day to get attention of users today early on. But Discord is so such a phenomenal tool that aggregating these people in one place who care about what you're building that then the speed at which you can iterate with them is unbelievable, yeah, you know. So our Focus really right now starting with this embedded apps launch a few weeks ago is

to bring to market the full loop of how do you as a developer like build a sustainable growing business on Discord, right? And so right now, um, we have all the parts, and we're, and many of it, much of it is in developer preview, and it's going to be rolling out over the next few months. And that will begin with, you know, how do you get your game listed in our app directory and in our app launcher, which sees, you know, millions and millions and millions of people every day, you know, coming there to find, you know, fun things to do with their friends and ways to customize their server. And then once they have added your app, um, how do you make money? And so, you know, we have in our own titles, we're running, you know, payments, and we have payments available to some apps today. So you'll be able to directly monetize, um, if Discord's on a phone that will run through that, you know, the phone payment systems, and on desktop, we have our own stuff that we've built that's um

that you'll be able to plug into, so you'll get sort of the expected monetization hooks that you'd want out of the box. And then re-engagement through there, and then all the backend, you know, dashboards and reporting and stuff that you'd expect. So, um, you'll be able to build and launch and monetize and sort of do that whole loop as a developer, uh, on Discord. You know, this is another one of those things where, you know, we, when we went and talked to a lot of the people who make apps and bots on Discord today, many of them have been over the years using off-platform payment mechanisms to try to cobble this together, whether it's just setting up their own website and implementing something like Stripe or trying to get people to go to Patreon or whatever. But all these things are super high friction for customers where they got to go off off-platform, log in, do a whole bunch of nonsense. And then you have to build all this stuff and manage it. So what we've

done is we've created an easy one-click solution inside a Discord that works just like you'd expect any app store to work. Um, where a consumer can, can, um, just either purchase a one-time, you know, transaction in your app or make, make a subscription. So you can kind of decide how you want to monetize your service, um, for whatever makes sense for you. You know, I think looking back over the 10 years that, that Discord has been around for, the story of Discord has been consistently observing what the biggest pain points are of, of, of people trying to communicate and do things they love with their friends, um, and making it just 10 times easier and, and this craft of, of, of giving people a way to do what they're already trying to do by sort of duct taping or, or combining different tools all in one place while making sure Discord doesn't get become Flo, it doesn't become, uh, uh, slower, doesn't become, um, more expensive has been, has been this remarkable journey of, of kind of ruthlessly making what people

are trying to do already easier and easier in one place. Yeah, I mean that's the journey of I think most great um products. Like, how do you make it so that whatever someone's trying to do is better, faster, and cheaper, right? I mean, that's the journey. So, you know, we often talk about removing objections or reducing friction in the process for, you know, a person who's trying to accomplish something. And whether that's a um, you know, an end user who wants to open their app and be able to quickly message their friends, or whether that's um, a developer who's looking to build and deploy their app, or, you know, some creative project they're working on, um, to people. So, um, we just, you know, love that we get the opportunity to wake up every day and help people spend time with their friends and um, you know, play games and en enjoy life. I mean, that's what it's about. I can't wait to see what

people build me too with the new platform. And maybe you know we'll check in a year from today. And instead of 20,000 apps, it's going to be 200,000 apps. We'll see, we'll see. But you've got some pretty, you know, pretty amazing stuff already on the platform. And I'm so excited for personally as a developer to get started on my, my side project this week. Again, cool. Well, thanks for having me. [Music]

How Discord Became a Developer Platform

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Discord: The Evolution from Gaming to a Thriving Platform

Discord has rapidly grown, with over 200 million monthly active users and 20,000 new activities built on the platform in just 3 weeks.

The company's success is attributed to community-driven product development and a focus on extensibility.

CEO Jason Citron's journey from a player to a developer started in his childhood, leading to the creation of tools and infrastructure for games.

The Evolution of Discord from Gaming to a Multipurpose Platform

Discord started as a game studio in 2012 before transitioning to a multiplayer game and eventually a chat app.

The platform's roadmap has been shaped by the community's feedback, leading to shifts in focus and infrastructure development.

Discord's unique ability to focus on gaming user needs while being extensible to other use cases has been a key factor in its success.

Discord's Evolution into a Gaming Platform

Discord was designed to allow integration of custom game content into its platform, following the concept of modding in the gaming industry.

The open architecture and API of Discord have led to the emergence of new companies, such as Mid Journey, which has built a generative AI model tool on the platform.

The platform has also seen the development of music bots, games, and the recent introduction of capabilities for building rich, visual, interactive experiences using HTML 5.

Discord's Evolution from Command-line to Visual Experience

Discord expanded its platform from a command-line interface to a visual, rich interactive experience, including web apps and games.

The company's journey involved a hack week project, acquiring a startup, and formalizing the idea of transitioning into the visual era.

Discord's focus is now on offering new capabilities for developers to build multiplayer games and enhance the Discord experience for users through storytelling and visuals.

Discord's Unique Advantages in Cross-Platform Gaming

Discord's embedded platform offers a seamless social context for gaming, allowing for instant and effortless interaction among a group of connected people.

The platform's easy accessibility and built-in social graph make it simple for games to reach a large audience and for players to pick up the game across different devices.

By providing infrastructure and abstracting technical details, Discord's platform enables developers to focus on creativity and gameplay, while also allowing for the combination of other emerging tools for a new level of interactive entertainment.

The Impact of Modern Technology on Game Development

The evolution of technology, such as game engines and distribution platforms like Discord, has revolutionized game development, allowing for more niche and diverse games.

Discord's unique distribution mechanism has enabled niche communities to thrive and create custom-designed apps for their specific interests.

The accessibility of modern technology has lowered the barrier to entry for game development, leading to a surge of creativity and a wide range of emergent behaviors in the industry.

Discord's Role in the Rise of Consumer-Driven Product Development

Discord has become a hub for various product developers, including AI and game creators, to interact closely with their communities, allowing for direct feedback and product improvement.

The platform's success is attributed to its facilitation of a tight feedback loop between creators and early adopters, leading to community-driven product development.

This approach not only helps shape the products but also builds excitement and a built-in community energy that can drive the success of product launches.

Discord is shifting its focus to helping developers build a sustainable business on the platform.

They are introducing a developer preview of new features, including game listing, monetization options, and re-engagement tools.

The company aims to reduce friction for both users and developers, making it easier for people to connect, play games, and enjoy life on the platform.