Levellr has released new Discord tools for video games marketers so they can better understand how gamers feel about their games. Levellr is all about making sure marketers gain insights amid all of the noise.
The new AI tools include sentiment analysis, a way of analyzing the data on Discord — which has 259.2 million monthly players — to discern how players feel about the games being marketed, said Tom Gayner, CEO of Levellr, in an interview with GamesBeat.
Levellr announced new additions to its suite of Discord tools which are now used by some of the biggest video games developers in the world.
Already in use by industry leaders like Epic Games and Krafton, Levellr’s platform solves publishers’ core challenge on Discord: how to turn its unstructured, conversational nature into intelligence and direct player engagement opportunities for marketing and player teams.
Levellr’s updated suite provides three new pillars of functionality to allow developers to turn community into revenue and marketing intelligence while directly impacting player engagement: an AI-Powered Discord Listening Engine underpinned by a flexible Discord analytics module and an engagement hub connected to studios games.
I asked why Discord didn’t do this. Gayner said that Discord has been able to maintain its huge audience because it has been extremely focused on the end user and building a platform for them. If you think about their kind of monetization, it’s driven largely by Nitro subscriptions. Now they’re building out Quests.
“But to build a software solution that is extremely focused on game studios and publishers requires a significant amount of focus and dedicated time to the set of customers that you’re working with,” Gayner said. “And that then comes with the right type of integrations into customers, CRMs and tooling, to get the unlocks that they need. And that requires an enterprise business to do that. And that’s not what a platform, the size and scale of Discord, is going to be focused on.”
While Discord is the essential hub for a game’s most loyal players, its sheer scale and lack of conversational structure have made it a black box for marketing and games teams.
Levellr’s platform illuminates it, using AI to reconstruct thousands of simultaneous conversations from the firehose of chat. It automatically identifies distinct topics, analyses nuanced sentiment, and allows for granular player segmentation.
This gives marketing, revenue and community teams an unprecedented and almost real-time view of what players are saying, why they are saying it, and how they truly feel, without having to manually read a single message.
Built specifically for Discord, the AI solution analyses over 10 million platform messages a month for Levellr’s 50+ enterprise customers. The software is now being used across a playerbase of 7 million Discord members, delivering a real-time understanding of players & directly impacting player engagement and playtime.
“We can now start to reward players in Discord for playing a game. And then that gets really exciting when you can reward them with that with XP in Discord that they can then spend on products back in game. And connecting those accounts allows us to start to drive that type of behavior,” Gayner said.
Gayner doesn’t believe what he is doing is competing with Discord. He sees a very fragmented marketing landscape today.
“If you are a game studio that wants to build a unified strategy and have a unified budget for Discord, right, you have Discord Quest solutions, you have community management agencies, you have hundreds of thousands of different bot solutions, and actually nobody’s built the marketing stack for Discord, and that is what our vision is at Levellr,” Gayner said. “We’re trying to build the comprehensive enterprise marketing solution for the games industry, which allows them to consolidate their Discord strategy and budget into one place.”
A foundational shift in understanding your Discord server
This isn’t just another keyword-tracking bot. Levellr’s solution has moved beyond simple alerts to an AI-powered system that intelligently reconstructs and analyzes entire conversations as they unfold in real-time across studios busiest Discord channels.
It solves a big problem. Relying on keyword mentions alone means you’re missing the bigger picture. The context of a discussion, the rapid-fire replies (“lol,” “me too,” “yeah,” “nah,” “frfr”), nuanced sentiment, and even conversations in different languages or heavy slang are lost. This leads to misinterpreted data and missed opportunities to understand a studio’s player’s true voice, Levellr said.
Levellr’s system also identifies distinct, parallel conversations even in the most chaotic channels. It understands reply chains and groups unstructured streams of messages into coherent dialogues. This forms the bedrock for genuinely accurate sentiment and topic analysis, transforming millions of messages across servers into meaningful, contextual conversations.
“The uniqueness of Discord is, it is unfiltered conversation. It is not neatly threaded, like you get on platforms like Twitter and Reddit. On top of that, you also have things like game data coming in as well. So there’s actually a lot more unstructured, unfiltered data to try and analyze. And nobody has gone and built this at a really high quality point, which you can trust as a studio for Discord specifically, and yet that is where more than 200 million gamers come every single month,” Gayner said.
Gayner said that Levellr can pick up all of the references that people make regarding the word “lag,” or delays in game interactions. And that can be very relevant to understanding how gamers feel about a company’s service. The large-language model (LLM) AI tech can capture that kind of information and make it accessible to companies via Levellr.
“We say this is kind of the Holy Grail, where we can analyze the quantitative game data with the qualitative community data to get a full picture of, ultimately, what’s happening with our player base,” Gayner said.
Granular, flexible analytics for your Discord server
Building on this new data foundation, Levellr has introduced powerful ways for studios to explore their community’s data with precision.
Role-based and demographic-level analysis
What it is: The ability to filter, segment, and analyze core data, from message activity to gaming presence, by specific Discord roles and other user attributes.
The Problem It Solves: Server-wide data is often too broad to get the signals studios need to lead to smarter decision making and precise targeting. It can hide crucial differences in behavior between distinct member groups. You couldn’t easily see if members with a “Subscriber” role engaged differently than those with a “NA” or “EU” role, or if certain games were more popular among different segments of your community.
Key Capabilities: Filter analytics by one or more roles to compare behavior across different segments. (e.g., compare the playtime of a specific game between your US and UK members, or see which topics are most popular with your “VIP” role).
Compare engagement data by roles to understand which parts of the community are most active and why.
Advanced channel & content filtering
What it is: A channel selector and new filtering capabilities that give studios granular control over their analysis.
The Problem It Solves: Navigating and analyzing large, complex Discord servers with dozens or even hundreds of channels can be overwhelming. Studios needed a more straightforward way to focus their analysis on specific parts of the community, like separating insights from your #bug-reports channel from the chatter in #off-topic-memes.
Key Capabilities: A smart channel picker allows for the intuitive selection of specific categories, channels, or even individual threads for your analysis.
Filter social listening topics by positivity, negativity, or conversation volume to quickly find the most important discussions happening in Discord right now.
Discord community game integrations
Game data from PS, Xbox, Steam and more allow customers to turn game behavior into direct rewards.
Dynamic XP System
What it is: Reward Discord members for engaging in the community and playing your game. Grant bonus XP automatically to players which can be connected to in-game items or currency, turning Discord from a separate island for conversation into a fully connected ecosystem.
The Problem It Solves: Game developers don’t have transparency today on whether Discord is directly impacting gametime, nor whether their manual efforts in their server are changing behaviours. By rewarding players with spendable XP connected to game, studios now have granular insight into the impact of Discord on playtime, whilst automating engagement with a solution players love, incentivizing retained and lapsed players to jump back in.
Key Capabilities: You can reward members for engaging in the community and playing your game. Grant bonus XP automatically to players which can be connected to in-game items or currency.
Marketers can design a unique leveling journey. Unlock cosmetic roles or new permissions at key milestones, and configure the leveling curve to match your community’s pace.
Branded Experience: Create custom, visually appealing level-up cards that members can summon with a simple bot command to see their progress.
And the marketers can keep engagement fresh by resetting the leaderboards to align with new game seasons, album releases, or major brand moments.
Levellr has announced its upcoming product, a rich Community CRM for Discord, which will be launching in Q3. This will empower studios to act on their insights with unprecedented precision, identifying and engaging their most critical player segments—whether it’s re-engaging high-spending players frustrated by a recent update, or nurturing newcomers into loyal fans. This transforms community management from a cost centre into a proactive, measurable engine for growth.
Levellr also announced the appointment of Scott Chapman as Vice President of Sales. Chapman joins from Unity Technologies, where he spent over six years leading commercial efforts for multiplayer services like Multiplay and Vivox. His 15 years of experience helping studios scale live-service titles will be instrumental as Levellr expands its global footprint.
Gayner said, “Discord is no longer just a community platform; it’s a strategic growth channel. Our intelligence suite gives studios the tools to unlock that value, and we’re thrilled that partners are demanding more as we build out our CRM solution. Bringing Scott onboard is the logical next step. His deep experience is exactly what we need to equip more studios with the technology to turn their communities into their biggest competitive advantage.”
And Chapman said in a statement, “For years, the games industry has tried to connect community sentiment to commercial outcomes. Levellr has finally cracked the code. By turning the firehose of daily conversation on Discord into clear, actionable insights, Levellr is providing the missing link between engagement, retention, and spend. I’m excited to help more teams unlock that value.”
Levellr converts Discord conversations into real-time insight and automated activation, enabling studios and publishers to drive retention and monetization from day one.
Origins
Levellr is headquartered in London and backed by investors including Mitch Lasky, Owen Mahoney and Dylan Collins alongside senior executives from Krafton, Riot Games, and SuperAwesome.
Gayner and CTO Ben Barbersmith, formerly of YouTube, started the company in 2021, while Gayner was working for a streaming platform. They got together to talk about what they liked about web-based platforms and other social platforms where the analytics were more transparent and it was easier to understand community sentiment.
With the shift to Discord in games, they felt like they needed to help game companies glean insights from their players.
“Discord is an incredible place to foster and turn your community into your street team, your evangelists. It’s very, very powerful for organic advocacy,” Gayner said.
Gayner said the data from Sensor Tower pointed out that a community-driven game install costs on average 70 cents, compared to $4 to $6 for an ad-driven install. So it’s more powerful to tap the community, but it’s also very challenging when you’re analyzing 10 million messages a month. And so Levellr was built to understand the community.
The company has 30 people. To date, the company has raised about $3 million.
More details
Over time, Levellr hopes to produce industry-level insights based on all of the learnings across the whole industry. He noted that some 72% of game studios say that Discord is a must have.
I asked if mobile game teams use Discord as much as PC and console game teams do. And Gayner said that some mobile teams like Scopely definitely use Discord a lot, as does Supercell and other big mobile game makers.
“If you can create a purpose and a reason to want to come to your community, which from a Monopoly Go point of view is people who want to trade cards because they want to unlock more roles and rewards back in the Monopoly Go, then Discord is a must have,” Gayner said.
As far as the best insights that the company delivers, Gayner believes it is using the social listening and sentiment analysis to try and unlock insights across product marketing and community teams.
This way, product teams get to understand player feedback on DLC drops or the latest updates, bugs and what they think they want to see in the game to directly impact what they’re building into the game.
On top of that, marketing teams want to be able to to jump on what the latest trends are. They want to be able to analyze player segmentation, to make smarter marketing decisions, and they want to understand community feedback.
“It’s unlocking insights through social listening is one benefit. The second is then activating players. So how can we then directly impact our player behavior to try and drive more game time, more spend and the core goals that we have as a studio? And then it’s proving return on investment (ROI),” Gayner said.