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OT: actually what I always wonder, is how Discord will make money. I mean they offer this huge free service for everybody (2.6 million concurrent voice users) o

by merb 8y ago

OT: actually what I always wonder, is how Discord will make money. I mean they offer this huge free service for everybody (2.6 million concurrent voice users) over 1000 servers that must be a huge GCloud invoice

meowface 8y ago
I imagine they make most of it through Nitro: https://discordapp.com/nitro https://discordapp.com/nitro
vertex-four 8y ago
They’ve just started a game store. Encouraging integration of their social features into games will allow them to take a healthy bite out of Steam’s pie.
- Godel_unicode 8y ago
  Related: steam has built in voice chat now. https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/12/steam-finally-adds-voice-chat-flexible-friend-lists-new-beta/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/12/steam-finally-adds-voice...
  - maemilius 8y ago
    Steam has had voice chat (group and 1-on-1) for a much longer period of time than that. I've used it on a regular basis for the last 5 years or so, well before the current updates they've made. What they added was voice chat to static groups[0], whereas before you had to invite everyone to a custom group chat every time. Definitely a QoL improvement, but not exactly "new". 0: https://steamcommunity.com/search/groups https://steamcommunity.com/search/groups
    - fro0116 8y ago
      The new chat is a huge improvement over the old one in terms of UX, but lack of persistent history is pretty pathetic considering the amount of resources Valve has available compared to a startup like Discord.
  - half-kh-hacker 8y ago
    Steam has had voice chat for a while. This article is actually wrong, it wasn't added in the redesign.
jhgg 8y ago
We don't host our voice servers on google cloud as that's actually really expensive. We rent commodity dedicated servers. Our voice fleet is basically JBOS (just-a-bunch-of-servers). We use really low-spec servers too (4 core - 8 thread xeons @ 4ghz), 8-16gb ram, shitty hard drive (as these servers literally do no IO operations aside from some logging), and have no persistent state.
- leonroy 8y ago
  > We rent commodity dedicated servers. So not even a VPS like Linode, Discord rent physical servers across the board? Or is there a mix of AWS or some other vendor in there?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jhgg 8y ago
    We host our voice server on dedicated hardware, not VPS. Visualization overhead for networking is too high for the cost. Additionally, you can buy bandwidth for much cheaper from dedicated hosting providers as opposed to cloud providers. For our usecase, AWS would be approximately 15,000x to 30,000x more expensive due to bandwidth pricing.
    - Slartie 8y ago
      Regarding bandwidth, since that is probably the most important resource required by your voice servers: do you strategically use the mixed-calculation-type pricing that some dedicated server providers offer (where you can get large amounts of traffic included in cheap server prices because very few heavy users are subsidized by many users that only use a tiny fraction of their bandwidth share) or are you rather renting dedicated uplinks for your servers that you and your provider expect to be fully saturated most of the time?
      - bcheung 8y ago
        Can't speak for Discord but at that scale a provider is probably going to charge you for the physical pipe 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, or by the bandwidth used (Mbps) using the 95% percentile method.
zucan 8y ago
Same thing as WhatsApp. VC pay most of the bills until the network effect has cultivated the userbase to a size attractive for a buy out by a bigger fish.
- ontoillogical 8y ago
  WhatsApp was bringing in 10M in revenues[1] a year with the .99cent fee. Not selling it wouldn’t have made them billionaires, but it’s certainly fuck you money for a team of 8. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/01/whatsapp-hits-one-billion-users-remains-in-search-of-revenue/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/01/whatsapp-hits-one-billion-...
Vishnevskiy 8y ago
This is how we will make money. https://blog.discordapp.com/the-discord-store-beta-9a35596fdd4 https://blog.discordapp.com/the-discord-store-beta-9a35596fd... Aside from the money we already make from https://discordapp.com/nitro https://discordapp.com/nitro :)
- Fnoord 8y ago
  FTA: > This is all in beta, so things may change by the time we’re ready to launch. What you see today will likely not be what you see in the future.
- merb 8y ago
  do you do that much money from nitro? I actually never seen that many adds in discord about nitro and I didn't even knew it exists (i'm using discord for over a year) and I mean we actually migrated from a 10€ teamspeak to discord. while it is unlikely that everybody in my group would buy nitro, I find it amazing that you do not have many adds in your app, not even about your own service. (i mean sometimes there is the update pop up and some messages between the chat messages, but we basically never use that much of the chat anyways...)

by merb 8y ago

meowface 8y ago

I imagine they make most of it through Nitro: https://discordapp.com/nitro https://discordapp.com/nitro

vertex-four 8y ago

They’ve just started a game store. Encouraging integration of their social features into games will allow them to take a healthy bite out of Steam’s pie.

Godel_unicode 8y ago
Related: steam has built in voice chat now. https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/12/steam-finally-adds-voice-chat-flexible-friend-lists-new-beta/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/12/steam-finally-adds-voice...
- maemilius 8y ago
  Steam has had voice chat (group and 1-on-1) for a much longer period of time than that. I've used it on a regular basis for the last 5 years or so, well before the current updates they've made. What they added was voice chat to static groups[0], whereas before you had to invite everyone to a custom group chat every time. Definitely a QoL improvement, but not exactly "new". 0: https://steamcommunity.com/search/groups https://steamcommunity.com/search/groups
  - fro0116 8y ago
    The new chat is a huge improvement over the old one in terms of UX, but lack of persistent history is pretty pathetic considering the amount of resources Valve has available compared to a startup like Discord.
- half-kh-hacker 8y ago
  Steam has had voice chat for a while. This article is actually wrong, it wasn't added in the redesign.

jhgg 8y ago

We don't host our voice servers on google cloud as that's actually really expensive. We rent commodity dedicated servers. Our voice fleet is basically JBOS (just-a-bunch-of-servers). We use really low-spec servers too (4 core - 8 thread xeons @ 4ghz), 8-16gb ram, shitty hard drive (as these servers literally do no IO operations aside from some logging), and have no persistent state.

leonroy 8y ago
> We rent commodity dedicated servers. So not even a VPS like Linode, Discord rent physical servers across the board? Or is there a mix of AWS or some other vendor in there?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jhgg 8y ago
  We host our voice server on dedicated hardware, not VPS. Visualization overhead for networking is too high for the cost. Additionally, you can buy bandwidth for much cheaper from dedicated hosting providers as opposed to cloud providers. For our usecase, AWS would be approximately 15,000x to 30,000x more expensive due to bandwidth pricing.
  - Slartie 8y ago
    Regarding bandwidth, since that is probably the most important resource required by your voice servers: do you strategically use the mixed-calculation-type pricing that some dedicated server providers offer (where you can get large amounts of traffic included in cheap server prices because very few heavy users are subsidized by many users that only use a tiny fraction of their bandwidth share) or are you rather renting dedicated uplinks for your servers that you and your provider expect to be fully saturated most of the time?
    - bcheung 8y ago
      Can't speak for Discord but at that scale a provider is probably going to charge you for the physical pipe 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, or by the bandwidth used (Mbps) using the 95% percentile method.

zucan 8y ago

Same thing as WhatsApp. VC pay most of the bills until the network effect has cultivated the userbase to a size attractive for a buy out by a bigger fish.

ontoillogical 8y ago
WhatsApp was bringing in 10M in revenues[1] a year with the .99cent fee. Not selling it wouldn’t have made them billionaires, but it’s certainly fuck you money for a team of 8. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/01/whatsapp-hits-one-billion-users-remains-in-search-of-revenue/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/01/whatsapp-hits-one-billion-...

Vishnevskiy 8y ago

This is how we will make money. https://blog.discordapp.com/the-discord-store-beta-9a35596fdd4 https://blog.discordapp.com/the-discord-store-beta-9a35596fd... Aside from the money we already make from https://discordapp.com/nitro https://discordapp.com/nitro :)

Fnoord 8y ago
FTA: > This is all in beta, so things may change by the time we’re ready to launch. What you see today will likely not be what you see in the future.
merb 8y ago
do you do that much money from nitro? I actually never seen that many adds in discord about nitro and I didn't even knew it exists (i'm using discord for over a year) and I mean we actually migrated from a 10€ teamspeak to discord. while it is unlikely that everybody in my group would buy nitro, I find it amazing that you do not have many adds in your app, not even about your own service. (i mean sometimes there is the update pop up and some messages between the chat messages, but we basically never use that much of the chat anyways...)