Discord ‘Activities’ for collaborative gaming are now free for everyone

theverge.com:

By Jess Weatherbed, a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.

Discord has announced that Activities — a feature for voice channels that allows members to play games or watch content together — will remain free for all Discord users.

While most Discord Activities were previously locked behind a subscription to Discord Nitro (which starts at $2.99 a month), the communications platform had temporarily removed its paywall as part of its eighth birthday celebrations between May 15th and June 15th. Now, Activities like Sketch Heads, Blazing 8s, and Bobble League will be indefinitely free to use. 

Some Discord activities like YouTube’s “Watch together” integration and the Putt Party golfing game were already available at no additional cost prior to this announcement. If you want to give them a try yourself, you can locate Activities by joining a Discord voice channel and clicking on the rocket-shaped button that appears in the lower left-hand side of the app.

It’s a nice perk for Discord members who don’t want to shell out for a Nitro subscription, and the timing amid the Reddit unrest is unlikely a coincidence. Reddit users have been migrating to other platforms — including Discord — following thousands of subreddits going dark in protest over the company’s API changes. That’s a lot of people looking for a new social platform in which to form communities about specific themes or topics. Discord is hardly a straight replacement for Reddit, but it’s already well equipped to handle the needs of siloed community spaces, and making some of its interactive experiences free for all users might entice more Reddit deserters