Fifteen years ago, anyone launching an indie game would have needed to make a Facebook. Ten years ago, they’d need Twitter. Five years ago, they’d need Instagram. Today, every marketing expert in gaming is going to tell you to set up a Discord server for your upcoming indie titles, whether it’s a thoughtful adventure game, intense multiplayer action shooter or gorgeous 2.5 platformer. Welcome to the Dissecting Discord series, a smattering of short blogs to help indie devs set up their Discord servers for success. Today, let’s put all the technicalities aside and just focus on that fundamental, high-level question. What might your Discord server look like? 

The Big Two: Value vs Attention

This is a concept that underlines more than just Discord – it’s the core of any social media strategy and needs to be your starting point. With any marketing effort for a game, your goal is attention. Whether that’s releasing a trailer, putting out a press release, doing a dev livestream or creating a Discord, the goal for any and all of these initiatives will always be to capture the attention of gamers worldwide. Capturing that attention, though, is only half the battle, since attention is naturally fleeting. A good trailer might get someone’s attention, but if that’s all you can offer players, they won’t stick around. Like an hourglass slowly draining away, you need to to offer players something to keep their attention on your game. That something will be your value proposition. 

If you provide players enough value, you’ll keep their attention on your product. That value comes in a variety of different forms. Sometimes, it’s raw information. Tell players about the game that you’re making, what makes it cool, what makes it exciting, what the mechanics are that underlie the awesome gif you’re showing, who are the characters they’re seeing in screenshots. Sometimes, it’s entertainment value. If you post a funny meme that gets a player to laugh, the value there is the entertainment they got out of that meme. Sometimes, it’s social value. If you’re a player looking for friendship or a sense of community, you might find that value in the Discord for the game that you’re really looking forward to. 

This is what makes Discord so powerful. 

The Conversation Engine

Unlike most other social media platforms, Discord is uniquely situated to deliver on that social value for players of your game. Discord wants you to be conversational, sitting down and typing back and forth with someone in a channel. Other social media platforms don’t behave this way. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have comments, but their value comes in broadcasting to huge numbers of players at a time. For every thousand impressions you get, you’re likely to get maybe one comment on a post. In Discord, you’re providing people a space to engage with you (as devs of the game) and other interested players. As they take advantage of that space, you’re generating value for them and that value is going to keep their attention for weeks, months or even years until your game finally launches. 

I call this “the conversation engine” because, in its ideal form, it drives itself. Discords always start slow, with low numbers of members and few conversations to be had. Many of those conversations will be driven by you directly. But as time goes on and members pick up, their interactions begin to shift away from requiring you and instead focus on one another. Interested players are talking with one another about your game, expressing opinions, agreeing, disagreeing, forming bonds and friendships with one another. If your game is a multiplayer title, maybe they’re organizing pick up games. If it’s not, maybe they’re just bonding over their shared experiences with it. 

Either way, this kind of community space should be your goal and should be something on your mind as you click the indigo button to set up your Discord server. 

In future installments of this series, I’m going to go into more of the nitty gritty details of how to make and manage a Discord. For now, you can feel free to join the official Akupara Games Discord to join that community yourself! Hope to see you there!