The future of player engagement is happening inside existing communities 👇

For Scopely’s Star Trek Fleet Command, we partnered with Star Trek and affinity fan communities on Discord to create an activation that felt natural and valuable, to drive new players.

It’s a great example of where the industry is heading: moving beyond intrusive paid media and one-way influencer posts to immersive, community-led moments with pinned events and sparked conversations that drive real play and participation.

Advertisers that meet players where they already gather aren’t just advertising, but they're building real connection and fandom.

🔥 🌌

Social media still eats hours of people’s days (more than two hours on average) but it stopped being social a long time ago. Feeds are now dominated by a tiny group of creators and celebrities broadcasting to millions who mostly sit in silence. Most people are lurkers, not participants. They scroll, they watch, but they rarely say anything.

The behavioural shift is even clearer in the data: time spent on social media has dropped almost 10% since 2022, especially among teens. And the reasons people do log in have changed. Use for self-expression, friendship and discovery has fallen. Habitual, purposeless checking has risen. People aren’t opening apps to talk — they’re opening them out of reflex.

This is why doomscrolling exists, why feeds feel worse every year, and why the big platforms increasingly resemble algorithmic TV.

Against that backdrop, Discord feels like a different internet entirely.

Discord has ~200M MAUs and tens of millions of active communities, but the architecture pushes behaviour in the opposite direction to social feeds. There’s no global algorithm shoving 3-second videos into your brain. No performative posting. No clout mechanics.

You join a server because you care about something: a game, a fandom, a creator, a identity. Inside, you talk to people who share that interest. Posting isn’t a performance; it’s participation. The interpersonal loop is closer to early Facebook or MySpace, when everything you posted was for people you actually knew.

This shift matters. When the audience isn’t “the whole internet,” you get real conversation. People ask questions in channels, jump into voice chats, compare screenshots, pick up roles, react to events, and share things because they’re fun and not because they might go viral.

It’s also why interactive formats thrive on Discord. Personality quizzes used to spread across old Facebook because they were simple social objects friends compared and joked about. That mechanic died once feeds turned into public stages. But inside a tight Discord community built around a particular IP, a quiz result becomes a badge, a role, an in-joke. The conversation is the content.

From a brand perspective, this isn’t nostalgia — it’s a strategic shift. Public feeds are declining as true social spaces. Engagement is falling. Mental health downsides are rising. And people increasingly see open feeds as low-quality, AI-slop-filled background noise.

The lesson is straightforward: the future of social isn’t mass broadcast. It’s clusters of dense, high-trust communities where people actually talk. And the formats that work are the ones that encourage participation — quizzes, polls, challenges, events — not more stuff to scroll past.

Calling Discord “social media” isn’t just a soundbite. It’s a recognition of where people are genuinely choosing to spend their time in 2025.

To design for that world, you make things people can do together, not more content for them to watch alone.

We’ve grown the team again: this time with 2 Campaign Executives, to help ease operational workload and add a level of deep gaming expertise as we value so highly.

Amber joins us in Canada with strong experience across community engagement, creator-led campaigns, and operational delivery. She’ll be working across our North American clients and is already running our weekly game nights!

Scott joins us in the UK with a background in esports tournaments and competitive community management, adding more depth to our execution.

Both Amber and Scott have exactly the kind of experience that helps Wildfire move faster and deliver consistently as campaigns become more interactive and multi-layered.

Discord just rolled out a native Shop, plus gifting and wishlists.

On the surface, it looks like a small update. In reality, it's a fundamental shift in what Discord is building. Until now, Discord has mainly been about connection, but this update hints at a future where communities aren’t just social spaces but they become commercial layers around the games and IPs people love, and Discord becomes the unified hub where play, culture, and purchase converge.

This is exactly how platforms like Roblox and Fortnite built billion-dollar ecosystems not with ads, but with in-context commerce.

The difference is that Discord already has:

For games and entertainment brands, this means Discord is moving from:
“a place where your fans talk” → “a place where your fans act.”

Buying a cosmetic, gifting an item, joining an event, taking a quiz, unlocking a role — these all become part of one frictionless loop inside the community.

For Wildfire, this is the direction we’ve been excited for. If Discord formalises commerce across more IPs, brand activations shift from engagement only to engagement with measurable economic outcomes on-platform, making the journey seamless and easier to prove the ROI we know is there.

If you want to go into specifics of your upcoming campaign, just reply to this email or send us a brief!

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Onwards!