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Following the Discord Social SDK launch on Monday, the free toolkit has activated developers to leverage the platform’s social infrastructure to enhance their games’ social and multiplayer experiences. The Discord Social SDK launch will also allow developers to improve their in-game experiences, regardless of whether players have a Discord account.
The essence of these social integrations includes a unified friends list that allows players to access their Discord friends in-game and their in-game friends on Discord. This is an act of making it easier to stay connected both in and out of the game. Moreover, the SDK offers deep-linked game invites, which enables players to invite their friends to join their party or lobby directly.
Communication features include cross-platform messaging to allow players to keep conversing across desktop, console, and mobile. Other features of the Discord social SDK launch include linking in-game chats to specific Discord channels on their servers and voice chat.
According to Discord co-founder and CTO Stan Vishnevskiy said in a press release, “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.”
Discord says the toolkit is already being used by many developers, including Theorycraft Games, Facepunch Studios,1047 Games, Scopely, Mainframe Industries, Elodie Games, and Tencent Games.
Discord Social SDK is compatible with C++, Unreal Engine, and Unity and supports Windows 11+ and macOS. The company added that support for console and mobile is also on its way.
The platform has well over 200 million monthly active users who spend 1.5+ billion hours playing games each month on PC alone.
