So I grew up with chat rooms/forums/bbses... and am currently an avid Discord user.
Why? Well the needs of some gaming communities have evolved and Discord solves those problems. I'm in various guilds in an MMO and Discord provides EASY screen sharing, EASY voice comms, lets users with privileges run small apps (typically used to allow voting on a topic, e.g. what raid shall we do, or allow simple registration, e.g. for the raid we voted on we need X tanks Y healers Z dps so click and sign up). There are fancier bots that grab in-game info and show it, letting you check on info without logging into the game, and so on.
I don't see any of this being handled well via chat rooms, forums, etc. In fact I would go so far as to be your counter-example of someone that grew up with all the old stuff and now thinks Discord is in fact a massive improvement, and not just superficially.
Meme sharing is also important since these days, the absolutely dominant way to get two kinds of info across to players quickly (good builds for your chosen character, and simple animated gifs to show fight positioning) are images. Lots of players also make build/fight video guides, but that's a longer investment in time over a simple animated gif showing where to stand and where to move. Nobody (rounded for simplification) reads text guides, in fact some info like how the group has to handle a boss fight, would be difficult to write a text guide for. You know the old saying about how a picture is worth a thousand words?
So I grew up with chat rooms/forums/bbses... and am currently an avid Discord user.
Why? Well the needs of some gaming communities have evolved and Discord solves those problems. I'm in various guilds in an MMO and Discord provides EASY screen sharing, EASY voice comms, lets users with privileges run small apps (typically used to allow voting on a topic, e.g. what raid shall we do, or allow simple registration, e.g. for the raid we voted on we need X tanks Y healers Z dps so click and sign up). There are fancier bots that grab in-game info and show it, letting you check on info without logging into the game, and so on.
I don't see any of this being handled well via chat rooms, forums, etc. In fact I would go so far as to be your counter-example of someone that grew up with all the old stuff and now thinks Discord is in fact a massive improvement, and not just superficially.
Meme sharing is also important since these days, the absolutely dominant way to get two kinds of info across to players quickly (good builds for your chosen character, and simple animated gifs to show fight positioning) are images. Lots of players also make build/fight video guides, but that's a longer investment in time over a simple animated gif showing where to stand and where to move. Nobody (rounded for simplification) reads text guides, in fact some info like how the group has to handle a boss fight, would be difficult to write a text guide for. You know the old saying about how a picture is worth a thousand words?