Discord finally admits that they handled things a bit… roughly, to say the least.
Discord has been around for over 10 years now and established themselves as a core communication tool for Gaming communities along the way. Offering text chats with full history for small and bigger communities, screen sharing, VOIP – and everything for free up front is definitely their selling points.
However, after their initial announcement on February 9 shared that Discord users would expect a rollout early March that would include Facial ID checks on a WORLDWIDE scale – casual and heavy Discord users made their feelings known through mass cancellation of Discord Nitro. (Myself included!)
Even attempting to clarify their stance the following day did nothing to quell the unrest – Users lost their trust and confidence in Discord overnight.
Searching for Discord Alternatives spiked up to 10,000% – shared by WindowsCentral – and Users looking for a simple, non-invasive space to just hang out with friends and share memes was surely on the hunt as many options saw HUGE increase in interest.
Classic known gaming tools such as TeamSpeak spoke of a huge surge of users affecting their server bandwidth and thanked everyone for their patience as they tried to settle the overwhelming interest. I was quite curious how Ventrilo was fairing, but surprisingly didn’t hear much word of mouth across social media. It does seem like they have an open beta for their new GameVox available – but with even the Self-hosted option costing $9.99/month – why not just try any of the other available software options for Free?
But while many options are on the rise – how do they actually fair? Are users actually transitioning away from Discord? Or simply looking for backups if the chat titan does fall?
While many straight up “discord lookalikes” are in the works – not one seems to be even close to the full scale of features that Discord has developed over the last 11 years.
Will this Policy change really turn off most users?
Out of convenience – the average user may just deal with however their account is “set” – ID or not requested.
It’s honestly quite doubtful to see a huge exodus after they have expanded their audience base as a main communication hub for many live service games out today – particularly for gacha, coop/MMO games – AND their guilds and communities off-shooting from those.
However smaller friend groups, experienced computer users, and those with a shred of suspicion are already making moves after the first announcement.
While Discord filed for IPO earlier this year – another term for a Stock Launch – it’s not hard to see that having this much data on their users (whether it leaves their device OR NOT) has quite a bit of value to it. They keep trying to ensure us that they are vetting vendors and trying to make options available – especially considering they had a massive breach only a couple months ago. Which is also why this announcement was so heavily scrutinized – acting like moving on from such a massive failure point and spearheading straight into the next.
They’re trying to rebuild trust – but honestly outside of declaring the idea isn’t coming to fruition, users just aren’t interested in this level of invasive behaviors.
Can the Competition Catch Up?
Personally, I think the biggest risk they are making here is even delaying it – allowing everyone else to pick up development time and try and add features while Discord continuously doubles down.
Between now and the end of the year could be a 50/50 on what happens to Discord – if competition can add the most desired features in record time – we may see quite a few options pop out.
I’ve used Discord myself since 2015 (Nitro since 2017), and seeing what’s happening is extremely disappointing – to say the least. I canceled my Nitro the same day, same as most of my friends.
Even if I can’t migrate my guild & communities away from the Discord ecosystem for now – whose to say this won’t change over the course of the year?
