Discord’s “Sponsored Quests” Are Essentially Glorified Ads
Discord’s “Sponsored Quests” Are Essentially Glorified Ads
Discord is a huge part of the gaming community today, thanks to its gaming-friendly features and more importantly, no signs of advertising which is almost universally hated among users (just ask why they ditched Skype). However, the upcoming change set to roll out next week may make this popular chat platform the very thing it swore to destroy – in the form of “Sponsored Quests“.
As reported by The Wall Street Journal (via Ars Technica), Discord is pitching the idea of in-app advertising to game developers that Sponsored Quests will “get (them) in front of players”. The company confirms to WSJ that this form of advertising will target users based on age, geographical location, and gameplay – while users can opt out of targeted advertising, they can’t do so to the ads themselves. The ads, while not as intrusive compared to most kinds, will live on the bottom-left corner of the screen.
Essentially, Sponsored Quest functions like a side quest in an RPG-based game, where you are prompted to perform certain actions (like broadcasting your gameplay and inviting your friends to watch) and everyone gets rewards afterward, which can be in the form of a game code or in-game items. What is potentially concerning, however, is Discord made no mention that this will apply to just the free users, or even the paying Nitro subscribers.
For a company that prides itself against advertising, this probably isn’t a good look for its users. Discord has also made clear that it will “probably” go public (in layman’s terms, getting listed on the stock exchange). Another social media, Reddit, has gone through controversies against its users amid its path to IPO, and it isn’t likely to be smooth sailing for this relatively young company either.
There’s potentially one bit of good news, but it’s not coming from Discord itself. Instead, adblocking providers are stepping in: AdGuard is putting the word out that it “will likely be able to block them, keeping your experience on Discord nice and clean.” Whether it will successfully block the ads or not is anyone’s guess, but one thing’s for sure – the war on advertising will rage on.
Pokdepinion: I say good luck to them because gamers are not the most patient kind of people to deal with advertising shenanigans.
