Since launching in May 2015 as a gamer-centric social media platform, Discord has managed to grow exponentially without pivoting to serve customers outside its niche market. With more than 200 million global monthly active users, Discord is doing just fine relying on its current user base, 93% of which play games, per the platform. But as it reaches its 10th birthday, Discord is finding ways to cater its product — which has hosted more than 1.5 billion hours of online gameplay — to a wider audience. Related Stories “Discord is one of these modern communication tools where, when it was built for a specific use case, it kind of eschewed the teaching that something should be very easy to use and optimized for new users and is instead really optimized for the core consumer. And that can be a trade-off,” Discord’s senior vice president of product Peter Sellis told Variety during an interview at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco in March. Popular on Variety “And you probably notice it when onboarding people to Discord that, if those people do not have a friend group to play games together, the Discord experience can be a little tough to understand,” Sellis said. “However, on the flip side of it, when you do have a friend group and you hear their voices while you’re playing and you stream games, you’re like, ‘Wait, this is the coolest thing ever. Like, where has it been all my life?’ And that’s what we hear all the time, especially coming out of the pandemic. So when we think about, who are the next 200 million monthly active users of Discord? Yes, probably a lot of them are people who play multiplayer games with their friends, but don’t use Discord yet, and that’s why you see us doing things like console integrations and getting stronger on mobile — but a lot of them are probably also in some of the concentric circles that are outside of that group.” What Sellis is talking about here is going for more casual gamers, but also consumers of “game adjacent” content. “Some of those things are obvious, like there are many single-player games that are fun to just watch your friend play — ‘Balatro,’ or something like that, and we want to build that experience, because it’s still social and fun to hang out with your friends just like you’re on the couch next to them,” Sellis said. On top of that, Sellis says “there are also things that maybe look and act like a game, but aren’t strictly a game.” “There’s a lot of fandom-oriented communities: fan fiction, very game and IP-adjacent, media and entertainment more broadly, just like content discussions about new seasons and new stuff like that,” Sellis said. “And then also games that are maybe a little bit more atypical. You have a lot of card games, tabletop games with really vibrant communities. You have things like fantasy sports, where Discord can really serve a great purpose.” The focus at Discord still is, and likely always will be, on the “intentional multiplayer gamer,” per Sellis. However, “there are other kinds of people who play games that maybe Discord has not served as well in the past, but it’s a natural tool for them,” the Discord product chief says, adding: “And I look forward to building for more of those use cases, for sure.”