Over the years we’ve seen various apps used for communication in games. Skype was of course one of the more popular options at the start due to its voice calling capabilities, but later we saw gamers turn to the likes of TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, and so on, although in more recent times it looks like Discord is gaining a fair bit of steam.
In fact Discord wants to make it so that games and its app are more integrated than ever, and have since announced a new SDK called Rich Presence. As far as end-users are concerned, this SDK will allow developers to make it so that gamers can join the games of their friends using Discord as a launcher, as opposed to having to launch the game separately.
According to Discord, they have described one of the features of Rich Presence as, “Similar to party invites above, increase engagement by letting players request an invite right within Discord. After a confirmation, both players will be partied up and ready to play.” The Rich Presence SDK will also introduce other features like adding a Spectate button to a player’s profile, send party invite messages, and more.
Of course all of this is contingent on developers actually taking advantage of the SDK, but we expect that more developers will integrate Rich Presence with their games in the future.