Forbes Asia August 2017

60 | FORBES ASIA AUGUST 2017

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ix days a week, a 26-year-old videogaming ce-

lebrity who goes by the name “Lirik” regales his

1.7 million followers on the streaming service

Twitch as he broadcasts himself playing Destiny

(a shoot-’em-up contest), Colony Survival (a city-build-

ing simulation) and other popular online titles. As he

plays—from an undisclosed location in Massachusetts,

lest he be mobbed by fans—another app called Discord

floats on his screen. Lirik uses it to chat in real time via

voice or text with teammates and to message with thou-

sands of fans in channels dedicated to popular games

like League of Legends and Mario Kart. Lirik, who re-

fuses to publicly reveal his real name, became an avid

user of Discord two years ago. He has since been chosen

by the San Francisco-based startup as one of about 200

influencers it pays to promote the service. He says Dis-

cord fosters a sense of community among his fans, who

chat, mingle and form friendships with each other. “I

have Discord open 24-7,” Lirik says.

Discord’s embrace by famous Twitch and YouTube

gamers like Lirik helped turn the free desktop and mo-

bile chat service into one of the biggest app breakout

hits in recent memory. Growing virally since its May

2015 launch, it has more than 45 million registered

users, who send some 200 million messages daily. Every

day 9 million people across the globe use Discord. By

comparison, the corporate messaging phenom Slack

had just 2.3 million daily users two years after its launch

and has since grown to 5 million. Discord, which has

been called “the Slack for gamers,” is adding 1.1 million

new users every week. “I haven’t seen a product that has

grown this quickly, with this daily usage, in a long time,”

says Josh Elman of Greylock Partners, an investor in

Discord. “If you’re a gamer, Discord speaks to you.” Co-

founder and CEO Jason Citron says, “Discord was just

something that was missing from the world. It needed

to exist.”

Discord has quickly overtaken incumbents like

TeamSpeak, Mumble, Ventrilo and, in some cases,

Skype with a simple formula: an all-in-one service that

combines text and voice communications—and, soon,

video chat and screen sharing—and integrates easily

with online games during playtime. The bulk of Discord

users are 18-to-34-year-old gamers who connect with a

core group of friends for hours on end to discuss strate-

gies for slaying a dragon or chat about work or their ro-

mantic lives. Discord’s mobile app shows users when

friends are playing and makes it easy to set up future

play sessions. Richard Hor dijk, an analyst at the gam-

ing-focused research firm Newzoo, says features like

these “set Discord apart from long-running applica-

tions” and have turned it into the market leader.

Build,

Race, Fight...

and Chat

BY KATHLEEN CHAYKOWSKI

Discord’s communications service for gamers has already outgrown messaging giant

Slack. As it nears unicorn status, the two-year-old startup aims to cash in on its success.

Technology

TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD FOR FORBES