Checkpoint 2: Our First Year With Discord Quests

Discord was created to bring friends together around games. It’s a digital living room where players around the world can talk and hangout before, during, and after gaming. Our goal is to make Discord the best place to play with friends.

Over the years, we’ve learned that the people who really love our products are those who play games and connect around gaming. In fact, our highly engaged community of 200+ million monthly active users spend a combined 1.5 billion hours each month playing across 8,000+ titles on PC alone.*

We’ve also learned that, while game discovery as a whole is challenging, Discord is a bright spot: the long-tail of games being played make up a larger percentage of playtime for Discord users than for the industry as a whole.** Discord serves as a thriving environment for developers to connect with audiences eager to experience new games.

That’s why, last year, we embarked on a journey to help connect players on Discord with the games they like to play, all while asking ourselves what we could do to also help developers and brands reach players authentically. The answer was Quests: an innovative rewarded ad format designed for our community. Quests are the most authentic, player-centric advertising product in the galaxy (as far as we’ve travelled, at least).

Quests is Advertising Reimagined for Players

With Quests, we built ads where everyone wins: players earn rewards for engaging with content and games, and advertisers authentically reach their audience. We grew Quests intentionally with a focus on adding value for our advertisers and users. In our first year we successfully completed 70+ campaigns and users earned millions of rewards. When they earn one reward, we’ve found they actually come back for more. In fact, users who have accepted a targeted Quest are 3X more likely to accept another Quest.*  

And, it’s not just the users who are feeling rewarded. More than half of our Quests partners have already returned for a second campaign, demonstrating the win-win nature of the offering for users and advertisers.

Over the past year, we’ve powered successful campaigns for some of the most recognizable gaming and entertainment franchises, as well as ones that are new on the scene — including Diablo, Street Fighter, Max’s Dune: Prophecy, World of Warcraft, Genshin Impact and more: 

• miHoYo used Quests to energize their audience around a major game update that introduced a new character, world, and storyline events in Genshin Impact. They launched a Play Quest with a high-value in-game reward. The campaign attracted millions of participants and generated an 80% increase in playtime during the week when the Quest ran.
• Max aimed to build excitement and drive awareness for its highly anticipated TV series Dune: Prophecy, engaging audiences and creating buzz ahead of the premiere. Max partnered with Discord to launch the first-ever Video Quest, featuring a 2-minute 38-second trailer that achieved an 85% completion rate from those who interacted with the request.

How We Got Here: Reaching Players is a Unique Challenge for Everyone

Prior to Quests, we had a lot of discussions with developers and brands who were struggling to reliably and authentically connect with players, fighting for the attention of the same tech-savvy, hard-to-reach audiences through traditional advertising. 

Players often reject traditional advertising, and can be vocal about brands that don't feel authentic — sometimes making it challenging for marketers to reach gaming audiences. With these obstacles, marketers can’t always rely on traditional playbooks. Winning means using alternative platforms and focusing on leveraging existing behaviors, not interrupting gameplay or forcing attention.

Now, with Quests, advertisers can reach players in the digital living rooms where they hang out. These intimate friend groups are ideal for authentic engagement, as evidenced by the 7x increase in gameplay when users play with at least one friend.*

What’s Next

Today, Quests come in two powerful varieties to serve brands across gaming, media, and entertainment:

• Video Quests: Focused on driving awareness, this format is ideal for trailers, new season announcements, downloadable content (DLC) drops, and other video content. 
• Play Quests: Designed to drive gameplay, these quests require users to play or stream a game to unlock rewards, creating an authentic connection between players and the games they love.

We’ll continue to roll out new features, like our recently announced expansion of Video Quests to mobile, to help advertisers expand their campaign reach, open the door to new advertising opportunities and more.

If you want to learn more about Quests, check out our website where you can explore case studies and speak with our team.

*Discord internal data, 2024

** Matthew Ball The State of Video Gaming Report and Discord internal data, 2024