Discord’s April Fool's video blew up on YouTube, securing hundreds of millions of views in just a handful of hours, but it seems there’s a lot more going on here than meets the eye.
The video, called ‘Discord Loot Boxes are here’, is a straightforward April Fool’s joke about adding loot boxes to the online communication platform. That, you would have thought, would be that. But something odd happened: the video saw hundreds of millions of views in the blink of an eye, so many, in fact, that it blew past the record set by the all-conquering GTA 6 trailer.
How can this be? It seems Discord accidentally ‘viewbotted’ its own April Fool’s video. Software developer Marvin Witt took to X / Twitter to say that Discord managed to create a working YouTube view bot by playing the loot box announcement trailer on loop in the background of the in-app toast notification about the video itself. Witt suggested this was accidental on Discord’s part because a member of staff expressed confusion at what had happened. IGN has asked Discord for comment.
I should mention they presumably did this accidentally, even one of the high up developers at Discord was confused as to how this was happening pic.twitter.com/0uRLQRRzSq
— Marvin Witt (@NurM4rvin) April 2, 2024
At the time of this article’s publication, Discord’s loot box video had an incredible 628 million views in just 17 hours. For context, ‘GTA VI Trailer 1’ set a new views record for the 24-hour debut of a non-music video on YouTube with over 93 million views.
As it stands, Discord is tearing up that world record, but of course it was achieved through nefarious means. Will YouTube make an adjustment to the video's view count in response? Meanwhile, the internet is having its fun. “Discord accidentally making a YT view bot is the funniest April Fool’s day joke this year,” said one user in the YouTube comments.
In other Discord news, the platform is this week launching ads for the first time, via ‘Sponsored Quests’. These quests give PC gamers in-game rewards for getting friends to watch a stream of them playing through Discord. Users can choose not to engage with them.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
