Can Discord solve gaming’s discovery problem?

Joe Tung, the CEO of indie studio Theorycraft Games, is cool as ice when we meet amid the tense chaos of GDC 2025. Emphasis on tense: From panels to chitchat at local San Francisco bars, developers stressed over funding, PR teams sweating over their next 18 releases, and businessfolk evangelizing about AI with varying degrees of confidence. The recurring theme of the week: With so, so, so many games, how does a creative team break through? 

Tung knows it takes more than just forging a great experience. After stints working on Halo at Bungie and League of Legends at Riot Games, he founded Theorycraft to make the “deepest games in the world,” titles that would entertain players for far longer than 20 to 50 hours. The result of that quest is Supervive, a melding of MOBA, battle royale, and hero shooter that sells itself on top-down shooter mechanics and fast-paced rounds. Since his studio released the game in early access in November 2024, Tung hopes Supervive will draw the attention of League, Dota 2, and Apex Legends players with a promise of genre innovation and a splash of lore. He’s incredibly proud of what Theorycraft has produced so far — and what his studio has roadmapped for it into the future. But now people need to play it.

“I think, fundamentally, a game has to be good enough to where it’s going to appeal to a broad audience, but also engage that audience for the long term,” Tung says of defining success for a title like Supervive. “I talk to all of my peers who are also in the game startup business, and I do think that is a huge, huge concern for all of us. How do you cut through the noise?”

Tung hopes the answers lie in Discord. The developer founded Theorycraft in 2020, in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, and immediately adopted Discord as the platform of choice for remote communication. But as development on Supervive chugged along over four years, Discord became more and more integral to the process of building a community that would both build hype for the game and inform the actual development of Supervive. Early on, when Supervive was still “Project Loki,” Theorycraft conducted playtests with Discord members, then brought those playtesters “into a room to talk directly with the development team.” Later on the team staged custom show matches between experienced playtesters and streamed the fights for the Discord community in anticipation of future playtests. Theorycraft even recruited Discord product managers to take part in the playtests to bring the social platform closer to development itself. 

“Building our initial community on Discord [took] an insane amount of ground pounding,” Tung says. “I think a lot of people look back on the fact that we had 100,000 people in our Discord community while we were still in pre-alpha as a huge accomplishment. A lot of industry folks that I talk to think that it sort of happened magically.”

There was hope that the developers’ pedigree would create interest around Supervive, but it became clear early on that “from ex-Riot Games, Bungie, and Blizzard devs” wasn’t enough. The announcement of the actual game was an inflection point for Theorycraft’s Discord community, but that had a cap in terms of driving genre enthusiasts to the community space. Now, having launched Supervive in early access, Tung knows the game will live or die based on the commitment of those who got in early, and the experience of play trickling through Discord.

“The marketplace is incredibly crowded right now. It’s really difficult to find the right audience for your game. And Discord of course has a lock on the core gamer audience. […] It’s just a way for us to get in front of a very, very qualified audience that we know is much more likely to be interested in our game to begin with.”

During GDC, Discord announced its Social SDK, a set of tools for developers that will allow deeper integration into games themselves, including cross-platform chat and an invite system that doesn’t require leaving the actual game. The intent is to create the least amount of friction necessary for friends to randomly join a game or peek in on an experience. As an all-in adopter of Discord, Theorycraft jumped at the chance to integrate the tech into Supervive. 

“If I’m online in Discord and my friend is playing Supervive, the fact that we can message back and forth with each other without that person leaving Supervive, or that person leaving Discord, is powerful,” said Tung. “And then the fact that my friend who’s playing Supervive can invite me and all I do is click ‘join’ and that fires up the game and I land seamlessly in my friend’s lobby playing Supervive together… that integration in and of itself is super powerful.”

For all the community-building hustle, Supervive has settled into a daily average of around 2,000 concurrent players. The subreddit for the game is passionate, but its members seem as anxious as any gamemaker I met at GDC, wondering if Supervive can really survive as it marches toward a 1.0 release. “I am really sad,” declared one particularly spiraling Reddit user.

This is where Tung’s composure is astounding. When I ask about not just interest-building, but commitment-building, he remains confident that Theorycraft will get there with Supervive through the Discord collaboration and their own vision. The team operates at a fraction of the size of a Bungie or Riot, and the intimacy of production — where the player base sat in rooms with the dev team — hopefully adds an entirely different dimension to the relationship a player can have with the game. 

Commitment, he says, is about “creating opportunities for appointment gaming, creating consistent touch points through competitive play. I hesitate to say ‘esports’ because of the scale of that enterprise, but there are many, many things like that.” In the era of “forever games,” success starts with very intentional community-building as much as the play itself. Otherwise you wind up with Concord and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

“Nothing is more powerful than word of mouth,” Tung says, of all the levers Theorycraft can pull. “Nothing is more powerful than seeing what your friends are actually playing.”