Wow Teamspeak is still around and looks like they are succeeding again. Teamspeak and Ventrilo used to be such a mainstay of the video game community. I was curious why so many younger people were getting Discords instead of starting up Vent or Teamspeak servers like we used to. It does look like Teamspeak has taken a note out of discord and slacks notebook and have gotten more advanced chat room options now.

Many reasons:

1. To DeDoS a Teamspeak server, it's enough to DeDoS a single server. You may not even need to do that, it may be enough to be such a nuisance that their host kicks them out. To DeDoS a Discord server, it's necessary to DeDoS the entirety of Discord, which is much, much harder, and also much more likely to put you in legal hot water. Discord is the Cloudflare of gaming.

2. Discord servers aren't real servers, they're tenants in an application, effectively "rows in an SQL table", not standalone containers requiring their own tech stack. This means they can be offered for free. You also can't abuse them for E.G. crypto mining, like you can with a VPS where a Teamspeak server can be hosted. Free increases adoption, which makes people a lot more likely to pay for extra features. It's the standard "the rich subsidize the poor" model, common to so many web applications.

3. No technical expertise necessary to set a server up. Bus factor is basically equal to infinity.

4. One service, one account, one interface, many servers, many groups, many people. There's no weird workspace switching and per-workspace DMs like in Slack (not sure how TS does this). If you log in once on a new device, all your server memberships are there, and everything just works. You may be in dozens of servers, and they're all behind the same single login.

Those 4 features are table stakes now, like it or not. If you want to be a real, long-term Discord competitor and attract real users, you have to figure out how to get those 4.

> I was curious why so many younger people were getting Discords instead of starting up Vent or Teamspeak servers like we used to.

Discord did a great job of making it easy and free to get all of your friends into a group together. Everything just works. You don’t need to have an IT person in the group to set up the server and walk everyone through connecting.

In the early days of gaming it seemed like every gaming group had at least one person who worked in tech and didn’t mind setting up a server. Now gaming is mainstream and the average gaming group doesn’t have a person who can host a server for them. Even when they do, that person would rather spend their gaming time on playing the games instead of playing the IT person for the group.

It looks like Teamspeak covers the "group of friends who voice chat each other" use case (Discord DM groups) but not the "IRC replacement" use case (Discord servers). As far as I can tell, the licensing for Teamspeak 6 (the version that tries to be competitive with Discord) is set up such that anybody who joins the server (as opposed to anybody actively using it) uses up a slot, so the licensing fees for larger servers would be cost prohibitive. Additionally, the text chat functionality is way worse than on Discord. There's no way to just have a chat channel, you can only view and use the text chat when you're in a voice call in a voice channel.

Discord offered more features. Voice chat was part of the initial sell for the platform, but these days most users don't even use the voice functionality and instead use it for long-running hypermedia chats with retained history.

I think the main reason was Discord basically doumping free server hosting with VC money to eliminate competition.

Now that money has finally run out, it looks like things are reverting back to normal.

Because a Discord server is very easy and free to set up, and has nice features like screensharing that weren't commonly handled well at the time. Before that, we used Skype or AIM or iChat if we even wanted audio at all; Teamspeak was more for "serious gamers."