So I've had this struggle building within me. I have a pretty solid and steadily growing Twitter account that's quite easy to manage and it has helped me build a small little community around my game. Some other developers have suggested that I start a Discord in order to further grow that community, but I've been torn on that decision because I don't really understand Discord that much. I lived in China from 2011 - 2019 and Discord came out during that time, so when I exited from behind The Great Firewall of China there were a lot of things that were new to me that others had years of experience with.

I'm currently part of a few servers, all aimed at game development in general rather than that of a specific game. I use them to get help when stuck on a coding problem or to get feedback on some artwork. What I don't understand is why someone would join the Discord of a specific game, either released or in development. I can understand for a massive game like Undertale or something, but for a smaller indie title? Yet it's those smaller indie devs that are recommending this to me. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's a bad idea, merely that I don't understand the purpose.

Whenever I have an update on my game, I just post it to Twitter, and if I was to open  Discord, most people in it would probably be from my Twitter followers and frankly I wouldn't even know what to tell them. "Hey guys, remember that tweet I put up? Well here it is again but in Discord!" 

So to my original question, why do you join the Discord of a game developer?

I’m in the minority, but I don’t. I, too, see no point in Discord servers for such obscure things.

Likewise, there’s a Discord for every single subreddit. I guarantee you they are not self-fueling, and will die out soon.

Then there’s Itch communities anyway. Maybe they prefer the real-time chat format for communication (just look at how the FnF kids converse here), but it’s nitpicking at that point.

I don't join such servers myself cause I don't see any use for me. I think it might be useful if the developed game has many followers who are enthusiast about game's progress and would like to get any update or news as soon as possible.

Well then, I guess I'm not alone in my thoughts. I can definitely see the benefit if you have a large playerbase and then you can form a community in Discord that centers on your game but also features a lot of other community activities where people can meet new friends, play games together, etc. But for a new indie dev trying to market their game? It just seems like a big waste of time.

I'd definitely recommend if you were a streamer, it really helps building a community of your own there and consequently building your game community as well. If you don't stream it can be really tough to grow a community with fewer interactions I think, but I guess it's possible, maybe making the discord some sort of patreon prize for supporting the game or something else could work idk.

There are a couple of YouTube videos on the GDC YouTube channel that discusses Discord and how to use it to create a dedicated community before game release. One is called Game Discoverability Day: Building a Community for Your Game from Scratch presented by Mike Rose. 

But, I think it depends on the goal of the creator and the game. If the goal is to create a dedicated fanbase for the game that's going to be excited about buying the game upon release, Discord might be a good option.

If you're more concerned about getting your game discovered by more people, I'm not sure if Discord is an effective place to do that. But, I haven't used Discord for the purpose of getting something discovered. I use Discord to motivate myself to work on projects or to communicate with friends to play multiplayer games.

I took a look at your page for 10 Days to Jupiter. Your page is organized in a professional way. Based on the images, the game looks polished. I love the last picture posted with the tree dressed in a jacket and sunglasses.

Thanks for the info, I'll look up those videos. I've found GDC videos to be pretty hit or miss but when they do hit, they hit hard. Also thanks for the kind words. I'm trying to balance the professional presentation of a big studio, with the Mom & Pop approachability of a small studio, even though I am neither, haha.

I have a discord server for my games but its just me and my testers. where I can post builds of my game and they can all post comments on whats not working, post screen shots, and give feedback ect.
For that I think it works great but I have joined servers for individual games and they tend to be ghost towns and I normally end up ignoring them or leaving them

Discord + a few features that it misses like prioritizing which groups to focus is a very good away to keep in touch with devs who are working on interesting games.