The part-time home for all gamers, Discord, is reportedly set to introduce advertisements in the service, and the news isn’t sitting well with players who are used to using the service without any distractions.
Discord was among the last few tech social media companies that believed in making their products accessible to the masses without any strings attached. However, after the recent layoffs in the tech industry, the company might be looking for ways to generate more revenue for the platform, as per a report today by Wall Street Journal.
Gamers, particularly, aren’t thrilled about this news. Reddit threads are filled with players threatening to leave the messaging and voice app completely. “If there are ever video ads, I’m switching to something else immediately,” one redditor succinctly said. Many of them are looking to change their places to chat while gaming on the internet. Moreover, people state that the “enshittification” of the platform will start if the update takes place in the future.
“The paid promotions are from videogame makers and will offer users gifts for completing in-game tasks while their friends watch on Discord,” the WSJ report states. This sounds similar to Fortnite’s Find the Force Quest, which asked players to have at least one friend in their Discord livestream while playing the game for 15 minutes to earn Coruscant’s Pride Wrap in the game.
The developers of Discord have also referred to these ads in a blog as “Sponsored quests,” citing the Fortnite example, saying Discord was “opening up sponsored Quests to more game developers.”
“The ads will be targeted to users based on their gameplay, age and geographic location data, and they will appear in the bottom left corner of users’ screens,” said Peter Sellis, Discord’s senior vice president of product, in an interview with WSJ. According to WSJ, Discord has stated there will be a place to turn off the ads, but it’s still unclear if the features come at the cost of a premium Nitro subscription or if it will be free for everyone to use as per their wishes.
There has not been any official announcement from Discord yet on this topic.
