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

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.