Discord wants developers to stick it inside their games with a new SDK

By Liam Dawe - 18 Mar 2025 at 11:54 am UTC

One of the great things about modern online gaming is how (usually) easy it is to link up with friends. You have your friends list on Steam, GOG, Epic and others but what about Discord? They want a bigger piece of the pie now.

Announced yesterday, Discord have launched a new Discord Social SDK, a toolkit for developers to embed Discord into their games. This will then add in your Discord friend list, enable game invites directly for people on Discord, cross-platform messaging and more. All without a Discord account actually being needed.

It doesn't support Linux though, as only Windows 11 and macOS have been announced. Hopefully this won't cause any issues with running Windows games via Valve's Proton compatibility layer.

Some developers have already signed up to use it including Theorycraft Games, Facepunch Studios, 1047 Games, Scopely, Mainframe Industries, Elodie Games, Tencent Games and more.

Pictured - Supervive with Discord, Credit: Discord

It doesn't necessarily need to replace other methods, but give developers the option to hook into it. So developers could bundle together Steam and Discord friends lists for example. It will be interesting to see if many more developers opt to use Discord, and how players ultimately end up feeling about it.

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See more in the Discord announcement.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Tags: Apps, Game Dev, Misc

6 Likes

About the author - Liam Dawe

I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. You can also follow my personal adventures on Bluesky.
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16 comments

Zlopez a day ago

Supporter Plus

I wonder if that would work without issue on Proton.

1 Likes

Pyrate a day ago

I hope this somehow falls off. I do not want Discord in my games.

16 Likes

R Daneel Olivaw a day ago

Supporter

Neither do I. If this somehow takes off and becomes widespread, I'll just block the entire service at a network level so I won't ever have to be bothered by it. Discord is just yet another closed private "social" service that will ipo soon and then be legally required by that ipo to enshittify itself to death.

I so wish an open source competitor that's not driven by capitalist greed would take its place, but oh well.

13 Likes

WorMzy a day ago

Nope.

3 Likes

ToddL a day ago

Enough with "sticking" these types of SDKs into games because it makes things worse, especially if a service like Discord ever goes defunct and the game can't function without it because game developers aren't around/care to remove it or go out of business.

7 Likes

Linux_Rocks a day ago

Hopefully they use protection. Cause you can't just stick things inside of other things all willy-nilly. Plus we don't want them spreading IPO disease. lol

5 Likes

Kithop 24 hours ago

Supporter Plus

Ooh, just in time for that big shiny IPO and subsequent (continued?) enshittification.

I've begrudingly kept a Discord account for RL friends this long, but I think this year will be the year I delete it for good and not look back.

Having looked at the self-hostable, free & open alternatives, I feel like my best bet is honestly going back to separate apps - Mumble for voice, Matrix (or XMPP) for chat, and something like Owncast for streaming.

1 Likes

Caldathras 23 hours ago

This would be useless to offline gamers such as myself.

3 Likes

pageround 22 hours ago

Supporter

I'm away from my gaming hardware at the moment, but didnt Skald have an integrated 'report the typo' option in the game? Maybe an API helps, but I just see a windows-only thing that will eventually break or not work well on linux. Pass.

1 Likes

Termy 22 hours ago

Dear game developers: please just don't!

3 Likes

sonic2kk 19 hours ago

This does not appear to be well-received with gamers, Linux gamers or otherwise. I haven't heard of anyone enjoying Discord since 2019. Hopefully this doesn't take off.

This one is a big "no" from me, even if I loved Discord, I don't want it integrating or overlaying in my games. Discord Rich Presence is awful enough - no, Discord, I don't want to see what my friends are playing. I can see that on Steam, and if they aren't playing on Steam then I don't want to know.

So... How's TeamSpeak these days? I've been eyeing up moving to Signal (I avoid Discord servers like the plague) but I remember hearing TeamSpeak was getting a bit of a resurgence.

0 Likes

Linux_Rocks 14 hours ago

If one good thing comes from the probable "enshittification" of Discord. Please let it be that IRC makes a strong comeback for chat.

1 Likes

scaine 6 hours ago

Contributing Editor
Mega Supporter

If one good thing comes from the probable "enshittification" of Discord. Please let it be that IRC makes a strong comeback for chat.

Never gonna happen. Discord became popular because IRC is baffling and archaic to most people. I'd love to see the rise of a truly open-source voice alternative though that isn't also baffling to set up. I tried Teamspeak about 10 years ago and holy shit the options... and despite everything, I only ever got terrible voice quality. Discord was a revelation when it launched. It's just a shame that it's neither open-source, or improved in any meaningful way since its launch. IPO may well kill it, tbh.

0 Likes

chickenb00 4 hours ago

Discord was a revelation when it launched. It's just a shame that it's neither open-source, or improved in any meaningful way since its launch. IPO may well kill it, tbh.

IPO will lead to enshittification which will lead to a less-bloated open source successor to slowly take the reins. However, Discord will still be the most common integrated chat app for a decade or so.

0 Likes

spymastermatt 3 hours ago

For those looking for a simple, open-source alternative to discord for voice chat, my friends and I have been using jitsi-meet for about 2 years now, as we found it had better voice quality with fewer drops than discord.
I only found out about it because it's the voice chat that matrix embeds if you choose it

1 Likes

Purple Library Guy 1 hour ago

Huh. I think of Jitsi-meet as an alternative to Zoom. In my tabletop-RPG group we're using it for 2 out of 3 campaigns, Zoom for the third (GM preferences). For the videoconferencing it's pretty decent. One nice feature Jitsi-meet has that Zoom doesn't seem to is you can easily tweak volume individually, so if someone is particularly loud compared to everyone else you can turn them down.

1 Likes

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