Discord is supercharging games with built-in messaging and voice chats
Discord has announced a new Social SDK to allow developers to integrate Discord-powered communication features directly into their games. This means gamers will be able to message, invite, and voice chat with their friends super easily — even if they don’t have a Discord account.
As reported by The Verge, the company has been testing the SDK with studios like Theorycraft Games, Facepunch Studios, and Elodie Games — and now it’s available to everyone. It’s compatible with C++, Unreal Engine, and Unity, and it supports Windows 11 and macOS. Mobile and console developers can’t use it yet but support is coming.
Discord as a platform exists precisely because it was never easy to chat with all of your friends in one place using in-game tools — and now that it’s so popular, game developers don’t really bother trying to compete with it. This new SDK will hopefully result in even smoother experiences for players without requiring too much effort from the developers, which sounds like a win-win for everyone.
It’s no surprise for PC support to come first but the planned support for mobile and console is where things will get really interesting — because these limited platforms are where direct integration is essential for smooth communication. You can’t just tab in and out of different windows on your phone or your PS5 like you can on a PC.
Before Discord was directly integrated with PS5, for example, I used to have to sit with my laptop next to me running Discord. It was always awkward because you had to choose between the limited privacy of voice-activated chat, or use push-to-talk and take your hand off the controller to press a button on your keyboard every time you wanted to talk. It was far from ideal. Now, I can quickly press the mute button on my DualSense controller whenever I don’t want to be heard.
The easier it is to chat with friends, the more people will do it — which will be great for the industry as a whole since it makes games so much more fun to play.
Willow Roberts has been a Computing Writer at Digital Trends for a year and has been writing for about a decade. She has a…
I broke HyperX’s new gaming mouse — on purpose
I’ve already gotten my hands on a lot of new tech at CES 2025, and I’m always careful. You never want to break a precious prototype that needs to be handled by hundreds of hands during the course of the week. So, you can imagine my surprise when HyperX put a broken gaming mouse into my hands and told me that it was broken on purpose — in fact, it was designed that way.
Of course, the HyperX Pulsefire Saga and Saga Pro aren’t broken — though, I understand if the image above gives you pause. This is HyperX’s bid at a customizable gaming mouse, providing you a solid foundation to build off of with your own buttons and heel. This is far from the first customizable gaming mouse, but it might be the first one that actually catches on.
Intel’s new 24-core CPU proves it hasn’t forgotten about gaming laptops
With the big Copilot+ push last year and Intel’s radically new Lunar Lake range, it’d be easy to assume Intel forgot about gaming laptops. CES 2025 proves the company didn’t.
Several months after the original Lunar Lake CPUs launched, which Intel calls Core Ultra 200V CPUs, the company is launching 200U, 200H, and 200HX processors. The latter two ranges are angled toward gaming laptops, with HX-series processors specifically targeting gaming laptops with a discrete graphics card. The flagship Core Ultra 9 285HX packs a total of 24 cores, and it can boost as high as 5.5GHz.
Samsung showed me the future of OLED gaming monitors — and it’s amazing
I knew we would get a bunch of new gaming monitors at CES 2025, but I truly didn’t expect Samsung — along with MSI, Asus, and others — to debut OLED displays boasting an insane 500Hz refresh rate. And I never thought that I would actually be on board with the competitive-focused refresh rate.
Call me a convert, though. I had the chance to play around with Samsung’s new Odyssey OLED G6 at CES, which comes in at 27 inches with a 1440p resolution and that staggering 500Hz refresh rate. And despite the fact that I’m not much of a competitive gamer, there’s a very clear path here for OLED to succeed where previous high refresh rate displays, such as the Alienware AW2524H, have failed.
