To tidy up the user experience, Discord has announced some pretty significant changes that are coming to the chatting and gaming app. In a dev post, Discord teams revealed that they are planning to cut some underused features to make room for new content and to keep the app experience from getting too cluttered. The team behind the project feels like some of these features are a bit too underutilized to justify keeping around. So far, the team has announced that two of the newest additions, the Activity Feed, and the Library, have been given the ax.
The Activity Feed is no more as of future updates to Discord. The functions of sharing gameplay information with your friends have now been rolled into Channel Following. This tab will allow gamers to track the streamers, content creators and friends that they want to within Discord. This should help centralize information and reduce clutter, as well as helping performance. The Friends tab has also been updated with relevant info from the Activity Feed as well.
But these aren’t the only things that are going away either. The Universal Game Launcher (UGL) and the Library tab have both been nixed. The reasons for these cuts are a bit more technical overall, but the reason seems to mostly be related to performance, but also a shifting of plans. The Universal Game Launcher just wasn’t the killer app Discord wanted.
These features were designed to allow gamers to centralize their game libraries, but with so many tools and launchers out nowadays, the feature went mostly unused. I don’t know of many PC gamers who relied on the Discord UGL to launch their games. Anyone who wanted to centralize them usually just created shortcuts through Steam.
