Ok yes the first answer is "please I want less discord servers" and I feel that. But I'm also looking at the imploding social media landscape and thinking, I need yet one more social media platform to stick Content into.
My main motivation is that I'm making a puzzle game, and a weird one at that, so I absolutely need to have playtesting done throughout development, and will need to regularly recruit new people in to take that on. This could be managed through google forms, but it does feel like this actually is a better use case for a discord. At which point it also feels like I should be maintaining it as a community.
At the same time, I feel like it might be too small. I'm very pleased with the success of com__et, the way it has spread and the recognition it has gotten from fans of it. But just under a thousand people have com__et on Steam, and of those only 232 have actually launched it. (those numbers may be a little off and don't account for itch.io, but that's still indicative of the scale I'm looking at).
This is a happy success and yet doesn't feel like there's an audience. Or at least, not a community that would have an ongoing conversation. I'm curious about other people's experience in this space/scope. I fully understand why multiplayer games benefit from an ongoing community but it seems increasingly like a discord is assumed to be part of the package for even smaller projects.
