Discord

Popular programs in Instant Messaging

What is Discord

Discord is the premier chat app for gamers looking to communicate with their teammates and coordinate with their clans, and it works well for both traditional console and PC video games as well as emerging mobile games. As the online space has developed and games have become more actively social activities, the chat options in many multiplayer games have failed to keep up. While many MMO and other online game developers are taking strides to help their users better communicate, these clients are often not up to the task of the complicated sort of coordination that clans demand. Discord arose to fill in the gap, and it does its task well. But since its initial inception as a niche gaming app, it's expanded its use. Today, it's a meaningful and lightweight chat interface for a variety of different cultures.

Discord has been described as "Skype for gamers", and that claim is pretty accurate. It offers the same sort of functionality and similarly relies on different channels that allow you to maintain a variety of different conversations with different groups and compartmentalize these conversations to improve the ratio of sound to noise. It uses private servers for more reliable service and better security, and it comes with practically all the communication platforms you need to perform with your friends at the top of your game. In addition to a full channeled chat function, there are also message boards and voice over IP conversation folded into the platform, giving it all the basic functions of Skype and then some.

But it also has some tools that are specifically designed with the needs of gamers in mind. The ability to run it through a browser makes it eminently easy to set up even if you aren't on your standard machine, and it offers cross compatibility between the traditional desktop software and the mobile app. This also allows it to minimize cutoff even when you're speaking to people from the other side of the globe and gives you control over the volume of your friends on an individual level. Even more important, it integrates with a number of different games directly, and PC gamers can set it up as an overlay on their screen, essentially allowing it to work as a replacement for the in-game chat functions without having to worry about flipping between panels or obscuring the important information on their game screen.

But the biggest strength probably comes from its adaptability to large groups. With clans that can number in the hundreds, managing large groups of people is important, and there are a wealth of options when you create channels to determine who belongs where. All of them can operate on the same server though, so you can keep all of your conversations neatly organized.

Pros:

• Features specifically designed to accommodate the demands of dedicated gamers
• Chat, message boards, and voice conversation seamlessly integrated together

Cons:

• Specialization means it's not necessarily the based non-gamer alternative to Skype or Slack