Verve notes an intriguing experiment being showcased at game industry conference Gamescom — streaming a virtual world, Fortnite in this case from within Discord:
Nvidia, Discord, and Epic Games have teamed up for an early test of instant game demos for Discord servers, which could theoretically let you immediately try a game without buying it, downloading it, or signing up for an account… It doesn’t sound completely frictionless if you still need an Epic Games account to play, and it’s not clear if Nvidia, Epic and Discord will offer the demo outside of Gamescom just yet. Nvidia is calling it a “technology announcement” rather than a confirmed feature, one that’ll hopefully see game publishers and developers reach out if they’re interested in potentially adding it to their games.
After a long, painful experience with streaming, I'd say Fortnite is not the best game/virtual world for this experiment, since it's twitch-combat based, and even a split second of delay is noticeable. However, both Valve/Steam and Roblox should be worried: Discord has about as many active users as either of those platforms, and the ability to buy/play games from within what's already become the Internet's central community hub for gamers could be a big move.
As you probably guessed by now, it's kinda in line with one of my predictions from Making a Metaverse That Matters:
While Valve has had difficulty creating a large online community on Steam, gamers have flocked to Discord, the social messaging platform. Now boasting some 150 million* active users, Discord is also positioned to add an immersive, networked virtual world to its players, perhaps as an optional add-on to server managers.
Actually according to the site, it's since grown to 200 million monthly active users!
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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