Discord announced on Monday the release of the Discord Social SDK, a free toolkit that allows developers to leverage the platform's social infrastructure to enhance the social and multiplayer experiences of their games. This toolkit allows developers to improve the in-game experience, whether or not the player has a mismatched account.
Social integration includes a unified list of friends that allows players to access their in-game friends in-game with Discord, making it easier to stay connected in-game and outside-game. Additionally, the SDK offers deep link game invitations so that players can invite friends and directly into lobby.
Communication features include platform messaging, allowing players to continue conversations on desktop, console and mobile. Other features include the ability to link in-game chat to specific Discord channels within the server, as well as voice chat.
Image credit: Discord
“For game creators from indie to AAA, Discord is a place where they can connect with the world's largest and most enthusiastic community of players and drive the growth of their games during and after launch,” said Stan Vishnevskiy, co-founder of Discord and CTO, in a press release. “The discovery and retention of games has never been more critical than ever. We are excited to help developers grow their games by getting where gamers are.”
Discord says the toolkit is already in use by many developers, including TheoryCraft Games, FacePunch Studios, 1047 Games, Scopely, MainFrame Industries, Elodie Games, and Tencent Games.
The Discord Social SDK is compatible with C++, Unreal Engine, and Unity, and supports Windows 11+ and MacOS. Console and mobile support will soon be here, the company says.
The platform boasts over 200 million active users per month, spending a total of 1.5 billion hours of games played on PC alone.