Discord's Social SDK to Support Social Gaming Experiences

Discord has released a Social SDK for all interested game developers that aims to increase engagement and retention through seamless social features, but also to increase visibility of games in a crowded market.
Discord has announced the launch of the Discord Social SDK, a toolkit that allows developers to use Discord's social infrastructure to enhance the social and multiplayer experience of their game, free of charge and available to players with or without a Discord account. SDK features include a unified friends list, deep-linked game invites, rich presence, cross-platform messaging and voice chat.
"Already rolling out in games from early partners, Discord Social SDK streamlines player connections and increases engagement while also making it possible to extend reach beyond the game itself to Discord's highly engaged community of 200+ million monthly active users who spend a combined 1.5+ billion hours each month playing across thousands of titles on PC alone," the announcement reads. Early adopters of the Discord Social SDK include Theorycraft Games, Facepunch Studios, 1047 Games, Scopely, Mainframe Industries, Elodie Games, Tencent Games and more. The Discord Social SDK is compatible with C++, both Unreal Engine and Unity, and supports Windows 11+ and MacOS. Console and mobile support will follow.
"For game creators from indie to AAA, Discord is where you can connect with the world's largest and most engaged community of players to fuel the growth of your game before, during, and after launch. Game discovery and retention have never been so critical, and we’re excited to help developers grow their games by reaching gamers where they are," said Stanislav Vishnevskiy, Co-Founder and CTO at Discord.
Discord also emphasises that the platform is a way to discover games and gain visibility in a crowded market. "The social dimension of gaming has become crucial for discovery. As players gravitate toward Discord - today’s digital living room designed for gaming – they seek active connections where real friendships thrive. Research shows 72% of Discord users play games with friends weekly, 50% stream their gameplay to friends, and 28% launch the same game within an hour of watching a friend stream [Source: Discord 2024 Internal Data]. When users play with at least one friend, gameplay sessions increase 7x, highlighting the power of friend-to-friend influence and Discord's unique ecosystem."
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