Over 48% of unreleased games have a Discord server, and I'm sure this is all fine and normal and I don't miss forums at all

It is the year 2026. You are in 25 Discord servers. Six of them are for your friends and family, one of them is so you can create custom emojis, one is just called "the chungle zone", you do not remember how you joined it. The rest are all videogames you haven't played in months.

I cannot say I'm exactly thrilled about the seeming legal requirement for every single videogame to have a Discord server now, nor am I—admittedly as someone whose job it is to keep up with these things—particularly jazzed about the fact that a lot of game companies are using said servers for their entire news cycle. I hear the Discord ping in my sleep.

And by "a lot", I mean 48%, as per a GDC panel by Timothy Lu, a senior staff data scientist at Discord, attended by PC Gamer's Lauren Morton.

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"Looking at all the unreleased games on IMDB, which is about 2,500 games spanning until 2,030 about 48% of those unreleased games have actually already created their official Discord community server," Lu explains. "On median, games typically start recruiting members into their game communities around 18 months before release."

The panel recommends that games recruit players into their Discord communities "as early as possible", but this is a talk given by Discord. More frustrating than my grumpiness at the current state of affairs is the fact that they're probably right.

As much as I'd like there to be, given recent privacy concerns and tie-ins to Palantir, Lu here is likely correct in that yes, if you want your game to have outreach, you probably need a Discord server, because who is gonna make a full new account for a forum? Even if I yearn for the good old days, I'm not entirely convinced I would.

Still, as those debacles did prove, it's probably not great that we're all tethered by the cuff to a tech company who, at any point, can decide to lose its mind and start rubbing shoulders with data-harvesting monoliths presently constructing the torment nexus.