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Discord celebrates its birthday with 130 million users

This in-gaming chat service has *tripled* its users in the past year.

Lori Grunin Senior Editor / Advice
I've been reviewing hardware and software, devising testing methodology and handed out buying advice for what seems like forever; I'm currently absorbed by computers and gaming hardware, but previously spent many years concentrating on cameras. I've also volunteered with a cat rescue for over 15 years doing adoptions, designing marketing materials, managing volunteers and, of course, photographing cats.
Expertise Photography, PCs and laptops, gaming and gaming accessories
Lori Grunin
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Discord

Discord is now the biggest 3-year-old in the playpen. The service, which was born out of a need for lag-free chat in multiplayer games across devices, has ridden the popularity wave of games like Fortnite and PUBG into almost 300 percent user growth over the past year, and more than double in other respects.

Why so popular? There's never been a voice chat service quite so easy to use -- just drop a link into your web browser, and you're chatting with friends and foes -- or so easy to scale for text and voice chat across huge gaming communities.

Or non-gaming communities, because voice chat doesn't discriminate. But games are definitely a big part of it.

Discord doesn't compete with anyone; rather developers can integrate Discord servers and communities into their game experiences, which is also one of the reasons for its popularity. In the past, incorporating these capabilities and scaling them required a lot of custom servers and code. This goes for streaming services like Twitch, as well. 

Many game developers have also moved to Discord to interact directly with fans. 

In its blog today, Discord celebrated with some impressive numbers.