As OneRedFox says, it’s all about the UX. From the perspective of your average gamer, IRC has awful UX. I know that speedrunning, romhacking, and other gaming subcommunities have used / still use IRC, but they’re very much on the technical side of gamers. Discord is a lot friendlier to the average gamer (I know, I know, it’s Electron and proprietary and shit for reasons besides those two, but consider your average console CoD player here). I still like IRC, too, though I’d love to see it evolve a little more quickly. IRCv3 is nice but my goodness, how long have they been working on it?
As OneRedFox says, it’s all about the UX. From the perspective of your average gamer, IRC has awful UX. I know that speedrunning, romhacking, and other gaming subcommunities have used / still use IRC, but they’re very much on the technical side of gamers. Discord is a lot friendlier to the average gamer (I know, I know, it’s Electron and proprietary and shit for reasons besides those two, but consider your average console CoD player here). I still like IRC, too, though I’d love to see it evolve a little more quickly. IRCv3 is nice but my goodness, how long have they been working on it?
I don’t feel like IRCv3 is a big enough jump ahead either. Kind of like MIDI v2, 10+ years too late