<story><title>Twitch to start selling video games this week</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/28/twitch-starts-selling-video-games-on-its-site-today/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shuntress</author><text>Slightly off topic but regarding Discord being &amp;quot;hard to touch&amp;quot; I feel like I must be missing something.&lt;p&gt;My friends and I just switched from Mumble to Discord and I find Discord to be inferior in almost all regards.&lt;p&gt;Discord&amp;#x27;s browser client is cool and convenient. The separate text&amp;#x2F;voice channels (as opposed to Mumble&amp;#x27;s 1 text channel per voice channel) fits our typical use case very well (people playing different games in different voice channels but sharing links&amp;#x2F;images&amp;#x2F;unrelated messages in text).&lt;p&gt;How has discord become so (apparently) big so fast? Is it just marketing money and slick UI design pushing it beyond its means?</text></item><item><author>goeric</author><text>Discord is going to be very hard to touch, even for Amazon. They should buy them as soon as possible. I know they bought Curse to try and break in, but it&amp;#x27;s just not going to be enough. Discord already has insane market-share in the community&amp;#x2F;VOIP area and there&amp;#x27;s not much even Amazon could do better that would get people to switch at this point. Really great software that consolidated people from IRC, Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>just2n</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s basically a generally passable VOIP client with a Slack built in, which AFAIK no other VOIP service has really done well (including Skype).&lt;p&gt;The barrier to entry being low, it being free, having mostly all the features people are looking for, and this persistent communication is basically all it is. Before this, gaming communities would often set up a forum (sometimes with a really shitty chat) just for persistent communications outside of games and VOIP, and this rolls all of that into one package that&amp;#x27;s really easy to use.&lt;p&gt;I had huge issues with Discord&amp;#x27;s quality when it was first being publicly used because I was on a latent&amp;#x2F;lossy connection at the time and it just repeatedly disconnected me and forced me to completely rejoin a Discord server over and over, which implied their engineers had no understanding that the internet is inherently unreliable. That seems to have been well remedied, so actually improving their software immediately puts it 10000 feet above Ventrilo, Teamspeak, Skype, etc from my perspective. I&amp;#x27;ve watched these applications stagnate over the years and it&amp;#x27;s bothered me pretty deeply.</text></comment>
<story><title>Twitch to start selling video games this week</title><url>https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/28/twitch-starts-selling-video-games-on-its-site-today/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shuntress</author><text>Slightly off topic but regarding Discord being &amp;quot;hard to touch&amp;quot; I feel like I must be missing something.&lt;p&gt;My friends and I just switched from Mumble to Discord and I find Discord to be inferior in almost all regards.&lt;p&gt;Discord&amp;#x27;s browser client is cool and convenient. The separate text&amp;#x2F;voice channels (as opposed to Mumble&amp;#x27;s 1 text channel per voice channel) fits our typical use case very well (people playing different games in different voice channels but sharing links&amp;#x2F;images&amp;#x2F;unrelated messages in text).&lt;p&gt;How has discord become so (apparently) big so fast? Is it just marketing money and slick UI design pushing it beyond its means?</text></item><item><author>goeric</author><text>Discord is going to be very hard to touch, even for Amazon. They should buy them as soon as possible. I know they bought Curse to try and break in, but it&amp;#x27;s just not going to be enough. Discord already has insane market-share in the community&amp;#x2F;VOIP area and there&amp;#x27;s not much even Amazon could do better that would get people to switch at this point. Really great software that consolidated people from IRC, Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>niftich</author><text>Discord competes with Teamspeak, Mumble, Ventrilo, and Skype in the category of gaming voice chat, but it also offers an interface set up like Slack, which has gained popularity for topic-based persistent chat. It hits a sweet spot of good-enough voice &amp;amp; text chat that&amp;#x27;s cost-free, needs no configuration, is fully hosted with captive servers, uses decent codecs, supports inbound hyperlinks, has a slick UI, has official same-name clients on mobile, has a web client, and the like.&lt;p&gt;Discord&amp;#x27;s rise helped by Microsoft&amp;#x27;s seeming neglect and confusing platform direction of Skype in recent years, even if Discord still doesn&amp;#x27;t have video chat. For messaging among people who know each other by name, Facebook&amp;#x27;s offerings are dominant, but for pseudonymous chat Skype remained strong until Microsoft vacillated between making Skype Windows&amp;#x27; native messenger or a strong multiplatform freemium network that isn&amp;#x27;t plagued by an aging UI and the invasion of advertising. Discord won many users by organic word-of-mouth referrals from people who used to use Skype.&lt;p&gt;As for gaming voice chat, Discord is not as sophisticated as other offerings (edit: maybe that&amp;#x27;s the wrong wording; let&amp;#x27;s go instead with &amp;quot;not as configurable&amp;quot;), but offers a smoother out-of-the-box experience.</text></comment>