Launched during GDC earlier in 2025, the Discord Social SDK is available for game developers of all sizes to implement Discord-powered social features in their games. Now, we’re excited to bring you some new updates, share some early successes, and ensure you have all the tips and tricks you need to be successful implementing this powerful, no-cost SDK.

❓Haven’t heard about our Social SDK? The announcement blog by our CTO, Stanislav Vishnevskiy, offers a full overview of the Discord Social SDK and how it works!

New Updates to the Discord Social SDK

Even though we just launched in March, we’ve already added some new features to our Social SDK! They include updates for Rich Presence, which adds support for custom buttons on activity cards, and improved packaging and documentation for Unreal and Unity console support. Additional documentation is now available for integrating and managing content moderation. We’ve also added some quality of life improvements, including more robust player DM controls to enable players to more granularly control their communication preferences while in-game. Finally, we’ve added webhook notifications for when a user unlinks their account or revokes authorization for your application, and now there are configurable request timeouts.

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Getting Social with RUST

The Social SDK enhances connectivity and brings the power of Discord directly into games, but how did we know we were building something worthwhile to players? Through early partnerships with game developers, we’ve been able to ensure the integration is smooth and the player experience seamless. Learn more in this deep dive from one of our early partners. 

The Studio: 

Facepunch Studios, the team behind Rust, was one of the early partners we worked with to implement and test the Discord Social SDK at scale. After over a decade on the market, Rust has over 20 million copies sold, and over a million weekly active users.

The Goal: 

Improve communication for both in-game players and their friends outside the game.

‍The Challenge: 

Rust has been an extremely popular active online survival shooter since 2013, with a mature, well-established playerbase. Implementing the Social SDK was the first attempt from Facepunch to implement social features in the game, and they wanted to surprise their players while promoting the integration.

The Solution: 

They took advantage of the Social SDK’s Unified Friends List and Cross-Platform Messaging features to keep players immersed with their squad without having to alt-tab out of the game when they want to talk. To help entice players to come try things out, Facepunch and Discord worked together to design an exclusive in-game reward for players who linked their Discord accounts to the game.

The Result: 

The reward gave the integration an initial boost to help players test the waters, and once people tried it, the payoff was clear: players who tried out the new social features stuck with it. Rust saw more in-game chat activity than ever before — and they all got a spiffy blurple trophy to boot! 

“The Discord Social SDK has added a dimension to communication in Rust. Players often rely on communication and we’re seeing a growing number of friends teaming up and getting together to play as squads.” Ashley Cook, Marketing Manager, Facepunch Studios

These early integrations helped us optimize our SDK based on partner feedback — like ensuring that players can control who sees them online playing their games and troubleshooting account access — to ensure players without Discord accounts have the same, consistent experience.

GDC ICYMI

We made a big, gaming store-themed SPLASH at GDC with a packed lineup of talks and partner sessions. If you weren’t in town during the show, no worries — catch it all on the Discord for Developers YouTube channel.

GDC 2025 | Discord for game devs: Build where the world plays

With a thriving community of 200 million monthly active users spending over 2 billion hours gaming each month, gaming thrives on Discord. This presentation shares  the latest and greatest on all the ways we’re investing in and enabling game developers to tap into the power of the platform to fuel the growth of their game.

GDC 2025 | From Vision to Vive’N: SUPERVIVE’s Discord-Driven Development Strategy

In this talk, Theorycraft Games executive producer Jon Belliss walks through the entire development journey of SUPERVIVE, including choosing to develop in the open with a playtesting community since just a few months in, why Theorycraft chose Discord as their primary community development platform, and how they use the platform to power their development, feedback, and community strategy.

GDC 2025 | Deep Dive with SUPERVIVE

Social play is core to SUPERVIVE. Integrating the Discord Social SDK helped Theorycraft Games improve the way players connect, communicate, and play together. This presentation shows how the team behind SUPERVIVE integrated the Discord Social SDK, extended the existing social graph with Discord friends, enabled seamless game invites into their party system with Discord Rich Presence, and got the SDK’s features in the hands of all players — even if they didn’t have an existing Discord account.

GDC 2025 | Powering Player Connections: How Discord’s Social SDK Boosts Your Game

Friends make gaming better — and Discord is the place where friends talk before, during, and after gaming. 

Join Discord (that’s us!) as we talk about how our Social SDK brings some of that ol’ Discord magic right into your games. Your players  can bring their Discord friends list with them, invite them into the game, and talk with them via text or voice chat. Listen in and learn how to best leverage the SDK to give your players more ways to connect with their friends. 

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Get Started Today

Phew! That’s a lot of stuff to digest! If you’ve watched all these talks and have been convinced that the Discord Social SDK is a great fit for your game, head on over to the page below to learn more about the SDK, access user documentation, and download the SDK itself to start implementing it into your own game: 

If you run into any problems or have a burning question on your mind while tinkering with the SDK, take a peek at the Social SDK thread on the Discord Developers server to find what you’re looking for or ask us for support.