Because a big “Join our community discord server!” on the game’s title screen isn’t enough apparently. They have to put a flashy animated GIF at the top of every update notification, change the name of the game’s Steam forum to “Join Our Discord!”, and even reply to posts in the Steam forum saying “You should join our discord so we can chat about it!” as if a forum isn’t a good place to chat about the thing that’s already being discussed.
Bitch please, if I wanted to be in the hell that is Discord I’d already be there, you can stop asking.
I refuse to join any of these in protest, and when I can’t submit bug reports via public forums I will rate the negatively.
I am firmly against using closed chat platforms such as discord for informational and support.
Years down the road obscure issues with the game are going to be unavailable either due to the server being abandoned or inability to look for issues soley due to everything being on discord now. I refuse to take part in it.
I’m only in one discord that is based off a game, and that is satisfactory exclusively because I was in the alpha program so It seemed right that I joined the main discord after the alpha ended.
Honestly this is one of the few cases where I wish steam would step in and say “games on the platform must have support on the platform”
I haven’t seen many steam games that don’t use the steam forums… is there a particular example that isn’t using them?
Many of them “use” them, as in have them enabled to allow for members of the community to post to them, and sometimes they might offer patch note releases for updates via the announcement system or major issue posts, but most of them don’t actually provide support and assistance via them or even moderate them at times. Huge problem actors are inde studios but, even large producers have the issue. My latest one that I tried to post a bug report to is Phasmaphobia, which locks all support to their discord, but like most games don’t do official support via the forums and the only support you may find is if someone in the community has a workaround or fix.
edit: for the heck of it ill look at the current top 20 and see which offer official community support.
Method to detect support:
I clicked the game, went to the discussions, if it had patch notes i noted it, if it has a community support tab or bug fix tab or comments that have staff responses I considered it community support. Else I marked it as no support. If it had a clear area to get support I noted that