Discord's Activities are now open to all interested developers

Key Takeaways

• Discord boasts over 150 million monthly active users and offers native social experiences called Activities.
• Activities are web apps hosted within Discord for users to stream media, play games, and more.
• Activities are now open to all interested developers via Discord's Embedded App SDK.

Instant messaging and VoIP service Discord, an established platform for friends to come together and game, chat, or just hang out, boasts over 150 million monthly active users worldwide (as of January 2023).

Apart from simply helping gamers connect with each other while playing multiplayer games externally, the platform offers games and social experiences natively too. Activities, as they're called, were first released back in 2022, and allow users to stream movies, videos, music and play multiplayer games together within Discord.

Under the hood, these Activities are essentially web apps hosted within Discord in an iframe.

Related

What is Discord: How to get started with the social messaging platform

What makes Discord stand above the rest, and what's it have to do with gaming?

The platform is now opening up Activities to all developers with its Embedded App SDK. "Whether you’re creating games, music experiences, or other interactive Activities with the Embedded App SDK, you can now build, launch, distribute, get discovered, and monetize natively on Discord," wrote the platform in a blog post.

The platform currently boasts roughly 45 Activities, with the likes of YouTube and Rythm to watch videos and listen to music, respectively, countless games, meme builders and more. This number will likely skyrocket with Discord opening up the Embedded APP SDK.

In its blog post, Discord indicated that it rolled out the SDK as a developer preview selectively earlier this year, and it found it to be a hit. "We’re seeing incredible early traction with early access Activity developers like Death by AI, Krunker Strike FRVR, and Farm Merge Valley.

Considering that Discord is already laden with gamers, the platform is the perfect spot for game developers to experiment with fresh ideas and offer them to a ready-made audience that can provide real-time insights and immediate feedback about them.

US, UK, and EU developers can monetize their Activity

Source: Discord

Developers with discoverable Activities can now offer one-time purchases or subscriptions directly within the app, giving users that want to unlock premium features or content an option to do so and generating revenue by monetizing their creations. In addition to in-app purchases, developers can also leverage Discord's existing Premium Apps monetization features, including Durable SKUs, Consumable SKUs and analytics tools.

If you're a developer looking to get on-board Discord's Activities, the platform's 'build' page is where you'll find the most relevant information.