Get chat perks and over 1000$ in games!
That sounds really nice for like a new variant to IRC, doesn’t it? (This is for you who are too young for IRC.) At least if you’re a gamer and play on PC. I mean, there are better services if you use consoles for gaming, probably.
Anyway. The Anny Blog has a discord server (no, this isn’t a post to plug this blog’s server, but feel invited to join!) and I wanted to do some real life user testing for it. I have a secondary account which I use to test various things when I play around with settings and such. As an admin it can be difficult to see how an actual user sees and experiences your server if you don’t have a secondary account.
And I decided to gift my secondary account Nitro to do some testing. It was pretty easy to get. You can pay with either Paypal or a credit/debit card and it’ll be done in a couple of minutes. There are two options: Nitro Classic which is just chat perks, and Nitro which also gives you access to a big library of games. I chose Nitro as I thought I could get double use out of it – test stuff for my server, and eventually review it as my second service review. I reviewed Crunchyroll Manga a while ago.
Here comes a complaint though. When I decided to give myself Nitro, they had made it look like Nitro was the only option available. I happened to know there was two options, so I scrolled down further. Classic is at the very bottom of the page in the app*. I’ll give it to them that’s a smart way to make people pay more, but from the view of the consumer it’s a really shitty thing to do, because nowhere in app does it mention there is two variations, so if you don’t know and just see there’s Discord Nitro, then what appears to be what you get with it, you might just not see there is an option that cost half of Discord Nitro.
I literally got this yesterday (at the time of writing – date would be April 28, so 2 weeks ago when posted). And then Cas asked me about what Nitro actually gives you and I decided to look a bit into it. And I noticed something…
Nowhere does it says the games don’t work on Mac.
I’m an iMac user. But there is literally nothing that says that the games are only available just for Windows after you’ve gotten it. Well, at least not in a normal way. You see a library. You get an “add to library” and then… You get to stare at the effing game title because it can’t be installed.
What was that? It’s because they’re Windows only games?
Nope, lol.
I have the following three games on Steam and they definitely are Mac compatible. I’ve even played Psychonauts and my only problem in that game is that I can’t “tab out” of it which is basically ctrl + arrow on my mac, because it opens in full screen, which is like a second screen for me – don’t ask me, ‘kay?
There’s no warning or anything. If I called the placement of Nitro Classic smart, this is just scam. Almost.
Because there is an orange-y warning at the checkout (and checkout only) you get when you’ve decide to buy it, but the print is smaller and it’s easy to miss when what you see if the option to choose payment dragging your attention with a bigger box and font. It’s even less visible in light mode.
Is Nitro worth it though? I mean, sure if you have a Windows computer, I’d say there are at least some games worth it. I’ve only played a bit on Psychonauts which I totally planned to review ages ago and that is definitely a game worth getting Nitro for and there are several more. But it’s only worth if you’re going to play them. You don’t keep games you get with Nitro, because you don’t buy them. The games can also be removed every once in a while, as others are added.
Humble Monthly work a bit similarly, as they have a trove with games you can download, and you lose access when the month ends, but you still get a few games with every month, and you can just pick the month you prefer, and you get to keep the games you did download. So personally, I’d think Humble Monthly is more worth it. It also has multi-platform compatibility so most would probably be able to play some games.
But would Nitro Classic be worth it?
Big. Fat. No.
You get a few benefits from having Nitro Classic and anyone can get them, regardless of the platform you use. But the benefits aren’t so good I’d say it’s worth 4.99$. The benefits are:
The high resolution for screenshare seems okay enough. I wouldn’t use it, but I guess if I did, I would pay like a dollar for it. The higher size limit is also reasonable. Maybe not 1 dollar a month worth though, but I could probably be okay with it if there were some benefits I’d be really hyped about. The global emojis… I’d probably be willing to pay a dollar for it, maybe only because I do have a server of my own and can just flex with those whenever, but for the same reason, I’d be so freaked out that someone used NSFW emojis, that I might even not want to allow that for others. I don’t know.
The gifs seems more like something that should be baked into the emoji so… I wouldn’t personally pay for it by itself. And the custom tag… like… Just make that a one-time thing? But to lose it to be randomised every time you stop using Nitro? Eh. Not Anny-approved.
All in all, I’d say that I’d be willing to pay, about half, because honestly – not really great benefits? I don’t like Discord enough to find it reasonable to pay 4.99 a month for that? I use Line – I pay for sets of custom stickers I can use ANYWHERE in the app forever. And I’ve used IRC before. I don’t see how I’d benefit from Discord specifically. I could technically have an IRC for The Anny Blog, you know? Or Line group, but it woulnd’t exactly be moderated. The youngsters (well, and people my age too) would be like “wtf is IRC?” and here I’m just “I remember when we had MSN Messenger, AIM and ICQ.”
I mean, seriously, it’s IRC with some Skype functions enabled. And all of those features are free anyway, so… Nah. 2.50$ is worth it. That’s what my support is worth, Discord.
Especially since they are really bad at relaying information. Imagine getting super hyped up about the game library, only to find out right before you paid – or even after you did – that none of it is accessible to you, because for some reason Discord don’t realise a lot of people use Mac these days. Games get more and more compatibility to Mac. Why are they not in on it too and support game developers who actually have Mac compatible versions of games they already have? I don’t get it, Discord. Do you?
So. All in all, I’d say, getting Discord Nitro is worth it if you can actually play the games and will play them, but if you rather want to get some games that caught your fancy and pay from time to time, just get Humble Monthly when some games for that catches your fancy.
But note! Discord itself isn’t bad. I compare it to other services – indeed – but only because I want to point out it’s not actually very special. But it does what it should. Too bad the Discord team decided to shit on a lot of gamers though.
* This review is based on the Mac desktop app.
Is there some other service you’d like me to give you my honest opinion about? Let me know in a comment!
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