In the past three months, our team at Stone Fruit Games has launched three casual games specifically for Discord Activities—including our most popular title, Word Rummy, which attracted over 2,000 players in its first month (and brought in a little bit of revenue). Now, I’m excited to share the insights and lessons we've learned along this journey through a multipart dev log series.
In each post, I’ll walk through the steps to integrate and firsthand tips to help you build and launch your own Activity-based video games on Discord. This week, we're starting with the first two parts of our series:
Part 1: What are Discord Activities & Why Should You Care?
Part 2: Getting Started with Discord Activities
Check out Part 1 below! We’ll publish Part 2 on Thursday, March 27th.
🎯 What are Discord Activities?
Discord Activities are interactive experiences—often casual multiplayer games—that users can launch and play directly within Discord. Activities run as single-page web applications embedded in Discord via an iframe, using an Embedded App SDK for communication between the game and Discord.
In practical terms as a game dev, this means you can build single-player and multiplayer games right within Discord itself. You’ll have access to built-in monetization options and integrated social features, such as messaging, friend invitations, and voice chat—all without ever needing players to leave Discord.
🚀 Why LAUNCH Games on Discord Activities?
Discord Activities present a compelling platform for game developers for several reasons:
Built-in Gaming Audience: Discord has over 200 million monthly active users, primarily gamers. The Activities app provides instant access to an engaged audience actively seeking new gaming experiences. A successful case is Death by AI, developed by Playroom / Little Umbrella Studio, which achieved a peak of 700K daily active users within its first few weeks.
Social Integration: Activities integrate easily with native voice, video, and text chat features on Discord. This improves multiplayer interactions and creates immersive social gaming experiences.
Community-Driven Growth: Discord’s server-based structure naturally encourages games to spread virally through community-driven word-of-mouth.
Native Monetization: Discord supports a variety of monetization methods via Stripe including subscriptions, in-app purchases, and one-time transactions, allowing developers to directly monetize their games within the platform.
In short, Discord Activities offer the right combination of audience, social interaction, and monetization tools, making it a promising emerging platform for game development today.
🎮 What's Next
In summary, the Discord Activities platform offers an exciting new platform for game developers, with tons of built-in social tools, monetization options, and opportunities to connect with a massive community of gamers.
Stay tuned—in the next post, we'll share practical, hands-on code examples to help you seamlessly integrate your games directly within Discord!
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