Yeah, and for every dozen hours spent on building a "shitty discord" that's a dozen hours not spent building the game.

And then there's the high friction. Now people need to sign up for your special website, sign up for your special chat, add another app to their phone if you even provide one....etc When 9/10 of those same people already have a Discord account and are already active on Discord.

You don't appear to understand what friction means. Because using an established platform that the majority of your community already uses isn't high friction....

It doesn't matter what the platform is. You bring yourself to the platform your users use. It just so happens that at this point in time it is Discord and this wasn't always the case and it won't always be the case.

You keep talking about how you don't want to join to find out information how you don't want to chat about the game.

Okay. That's fine, that's your choice, Why are you trying to shove your choice down other people's throat then, you don't have to join, you don't have to talk about the game. It's not required.