Making money on the internet is hard. Trust and believe me, I’ve tried. But when you start forcibly start serving content that people don’t want because someone paid you to, it’s not necessarily a good look. And just like everyone else, Discord has decided that’s the road it wants to go down, even though it wasn’t.
On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Discord is trying to bring in ads from game developers and publishers “in the coming week.” Discord itself tried to explain its approach in a blog post. From its perspective, you’ll be earning gifts for playing certain games and completing “Sponsored Quests” while streaming to friends. Those friends will, in turn, complete their own quests to get rewards for themselves. It’s giving Twitch drops.
This will be going on along with Discord’s Nitro subscription service. You can pay $2.99 for basic or $9.99 for the regular version.
This also comes after the company laid off 170 employees at the beginning of the year. It was becoming “increasingly clear” it needed to “sharpen our focus” and “bring more agility to our organization”.
And I have to give it to them. They have become agile, because, back in January, Discord was last seen saying they weren’t going to do ads.
Now, I spent some time talking with some Mastodon folks about alternatives to Discord. While some of us can admit there is no other place to go to (or stand up) that could fully replace Discord, it isn’t like those talks aren’t happening.
More of these companies just really need to think about sustainability and not growth.
Source: Gamespot
