I'm not arguing that the features/ease of use is the reason why its doing well. All of those features are unmatched for average consumers that don't care about their privacy which is their customer/product base. I didn't say anything about the features you mentioned and was talking about voice chat only.
>Most [gamers] don't care about RAM usage.
Source?
Anyone I know who games on a PC is almost always hyper aware of what crap is running on their system.
I'm simply arguing what the point is that I quoted, that it is obnoxiously heavy (250mb minimum ram, sometimes 450Mb+,) uptime is questionable, buggy application, and does care about user privacy. They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers.
Quick, ad-hoc voice chat with minimal hassle is one of the most important features of gaming voice chat. A big reason discord is more successful than other solutions in the space is that they recognized this. You can try to define 'voice chat' down to something mumble is good at but it doesn't end up being a very interesting way to compare things.
A key feature that I never see discord having is nested subchannels with whisper/shout. I play a game where we will have thousands of players in the same shard and need people to be able to communicate with each other in subchannels while still being able to hear and speak up to the entire channel. We did switch from Jabber to Discord for paging purposes though.
Personally I hate running Discord because my computer already has trouble running 8 game clients, but I see the value in its appeal to the mass market. Personally I prefer the days when every friend group had a ventrilo server, and if not you'd use Skype (before it got ruined) for those adhoc meetups.
I think in many ways discord hits it's peak when it can separate easily into multiple voice channels each with about 4-10 people each. I really like nested voice channels (like Mumbles linked channels) but really they don't show their benefits until you're deep into more complicated stuff (raids/etc) then the average person hits.
I think discords biggest (gaming-related) pull is that it's so simple to onboard someone. Once you get someone through the "two clicks" of on-boarding, it's much easier to get the them to say, especially since it's cross platform.
That's a 'key feature' for a rather narrow niche of players. Which makes a lot of sense - voice chat itself was once a special thing for srscat gaming enthusiasts. The trouble is, the voice chat products themselves got stuck there, even as networking, median hardware and multiplayer gaming itself got a lot more popular. Discord is just a better product, not for 'the mass market' but generally and it's worth studying rather than dismissing its success especially if you want better voice chat tools that also meet your specialized needs.
That's fair, there is a distinction between the actual process of using voice chat versus the specifications of the voice chat. It seems that I took OP as referring to the former, while you're referring to the latter.
> Source? Anyone I know who games on a PC is almost always hyper aware of what crap is running on their system.
None but anecdotal, much like this.
> I'm simply arguing what the point is that I quoted, that it is obnoxiously heavy (250mb minimum ram, sometimes 450Mb+,) uptime is questionable, buggy application, and does care about user privacy.
Right, you're arguing that it sucks because of those points are I argued back that the ease-of-us, UI, and "good-enough" quality are why Discord doesn't suck (or sucks less if you prefer) then the alternatives.
> They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers.
I've never heard of that and find it strange considering you don't even have to set a password for user accounts as someone mentioned elsewhere in the comments. Sounds like a per-server setting
> They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers.
Some servers can opt into extreme "are you a human?" validation and SMS verification is a good, universal signal of that. It helps prevent botting, alt accounts (frequent reuse of that number shouldn't be possible IIRC), and ban evasion.
Also, if Discord itself notices weird activity coming from your account that looks like a selfbot (a program pretending to be the client via Discord's private API) or automation, it can pop up that verification flow. I'm guessing extremely abusive shared IPs can also trigger this.
But AFAIK you don't have to attach your phone number to continue. (I don't remember if it only suggests to link your phone for 2FA or that it auto-links and you can remove phone 2FA afterwards) Discord have outright denied selling or forwarding your info, and they don't show or plan to show ads. In that case, what's the issue with one-time phone verification in some cases?
Negative, if you get their triggered anti spam response for creating an account fresh, or even logging into an existing account, you literally cannot log into that account anymore without providing a nonvoip phone number. You have to attach a phone number to continue.
What's the issue? Maybe the user doesn't have a phone number to give. Maybe the user already has that phone number attached to another account. Maybe they don't want to attach their phone number to a huge set of data, depending on their use, if indeed discord sells or begins to sell it. Rhetorical question if you ask me.
250mb for a singleton app is not that big of a deal these days. Most browser tabs use more memory than that these days (which really does make me mad).
>Most [gamers] don't care about RAM usage. Source? Anyone I know who games on a PC is almost always hyper aware of what crap is running on their system.
I'm simply arguing what the point is that I quoted, that it is obnoxiously heavy (250mb minimum ram, sometimes 450Mb+,) uptime is questionable, buggy application, and does care about user privacy. They force you to use a non-voip phone number for account creation now in some cases. Or joining some servers.