A group messaging app that integrates video, voice, and text
Exploring an interesting piece of internal tech: An engineer suggested building out one piece of tech he thought was interesting.
A mobile multiplayer game called "Fates Forever"
Realized it wasn't ever going to become a big business
https://toucharcade.com/2015/09/14/ex-fates-forever-developers-making-discord-a-voice-comm-app-for-multiplayer-mobile-games/ https://readlaunched.substack.com/p/-how-discord-dominated-gaming https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWziPJvxkmc
“We soft-launched FF in the fall of 2013 and, after months of testing, had a hunch it wasn’t going to be a hit, but we released it anyway in the spring of 2014 to confirm. At that point it was pretty clear it wasn’t working as is (an iPad MOBA), but we committed to post-content updates for a bit while starting to port it to iPhone and explore other ideas. I think it was winter 2014 when we first started seriously discussing the Discord concept. We started coding January 2015, and after a few months of working on a new game and Discord in parallel, I realized we had to pick one as a small startup. That’s when I did a hard pivot—in April 2015—and let go of the game production side of the company (about six people, 30% or so). A few weeks later, the focus caused us to figure it out and we ‘launched’ Discord on May 13, 2015. (That’s when we got people we didn’t know to actually start joining from all over the internet—50 people that day!) One thing I’ll note is that when I started in 2012, my vision was to eventually build a comms app for gaming. The game was an attempt to bootstrap the network, and then when it didn’t get traction, we eventually realized a way to just go direct to market with a chat app.” —Jason Citron, co-founder and CEO -- “His first company started as a video game studio and even launched a game on the iPhone App Store’s first day in 2008. That petered out and eventually pivoted into a social network for gamers called OpenFeint, which Citron described as ‘essentially like Xbox Live for iPhones.’ He sold that to the Japanese gaming giant Gree, then started another company, Hammer & Chisel, in 2012 ‘with the idea of building a new kind of gaming company, more around tablets and core multiplayer games.’ It built a game called Fates Forever, an online multiplayer game that feels a lot like League of Legends. It also built voice and text chat into the game, so players could talk to each other while they played. And then that extremely Silicon Valley thing happened: Citron and his team realized that the best thing about their game was the chat feature. This was circa 2014, when everyone was still using TeamSpeak or Skype and everyone still hated TeamSpeak or Skype. Citron and the Hammer & Chisel team knew they could do better and decided they wanted to try. It was a painful transition. Hammer & Chisel shut down its game development team, laid off a third of the company, shifted a lot of people to new roles, and spent about six months reorienting the company and its culture. It wasn’t obvious its new idea was going to work, either. ‘When we decided to go all in on Discord, we had maybe 10 users,’ Citron said. There was one group playing League of Legends, one WoW guild, and not much else. ‘We would show it to our friends, and they’d be like, “This is cool!” and then they’d never use it.’ After talking to users and seeing the data, the team realized its problem: Discord was better than Skype, certainly, but it still wasn’t very good. Calls would fail; quality would waver. Why would people drop a tool they hated for another tool they’d learn to hate? The Discord team ended up completely rebuilding its voice technology three times in the first few months of the app’s life. Around the same time, it also launched a feature that let users moderate, ban, and give roles and permissions to others in their server. That was when people who tested Discord started to immediately notice it was better. And tell their friends about it.” —David Pierce, Protocol
1 year
One piece of tech