I'm more of a casual gamer these days, but a friend of mine was (and still is) a pretty hardcore gamer. I encountered discord somewhere in it's early days before anyone really knew about it, and recommended it to him at a time when he was complaining that one of his gaming groups was falling apart. He then introduced discord to that group which revived it completely, and afaik, they're still pretty active. He's also paying for the nitro stuff and a pretty happy user.
I think the core reason for their success is a deep understanding of the problems their core audience - gamers - was facing. Gaming is organised in communities, and it was built around that. It solved multiple issues for them, mostly - it made interacting fun and easy. It supports emoji, is meme and web-friendly, organising to play games together is made easier, you can see who's playing what, built-in voice-chat, moderation, ... Barrier of entry was also very low, you could just use the web-client, no need to install. But it also works on mobile, which makes it work for console gamers too.
Until discord came along, you could do all these things by combining different tools, but never as good, and having to deal with multiple tools made the barrier of entry way too high. When I was younger, a gamer had to be someone somewhat technically skilled. IRC, ip addresses, dedicated servers, ... made it all a lot harder to get into. Gaming however is very mainstream these days, and it keeps surprising me how small the the average gamer's technical knowledge is. And that's no a bad thing imho, gaming in the end is something to be enjoyed, no need for gatekeeping.
>when he was complaining that one of his gaming groups was falling apart.
Speaking of this, I think Discord also conquered one more application in relative secrecy, and that's the gaming community forum. reddit took on regular forums, but for smaller communities I think reddit fails at this.
Discord gives you multiple channels to talk in, which allows conversation grouping like sub-forums, and extensive chat histories with search, removing the non-permanence of other chat options.
I think the core reason for their success is a deep understanding of the problems their core audience - gamers - was facing. Gaming is organised in communities, and it was built around that. It solved multiple issues for them, mostly - it made interacting fun and easy. It supports emoji, is meme and web-friendly, organising to play games together is made easier, you can see who's playing what, built-in voice-chat, moderation, ... Barrier of entry was also very low, you could just use the web-client, no need to install. But it also works on mobile, which makes it work for console gamers too.
Until discord came along, you could do all these things by combining different tools, but never as good, and having to deal with multiple tools made the barrier of entry way too high. When I was younger, a gamer had to be someone somewhat technically skilled. IRC, ip addresses, dedicated servers, ... made it all a lot harder to get into. Gaming however is very mainstream these days, and it keeps surprising me how small the the average gamer's technical knowledge is. And that's no a bad thing imho, gaming in the end is something to be enjoyed, no need for gatekeeping.