Discord has just announced that all voice and video calls that take place on its platform will now enjoy end-to-end encryption.

You may be forgiven for thinking the platform already had this in place, but that's not the case. The platform began 'experimenting' with end-to-end encryption back in 2023, but has only just made it the standard for almost every call.

I say 'almost' because the major exception is voice and video calls taking place on a server's stage channel. Otherwise, for standard server channels, the switch is automatic with no need to opt in. The company says that right now, "every voice and video call on Discord, whether in DMs, group DMs, voice channels, or Go Live streams, is end-to-end encrypted by default."

The vice president of technology at Discord, Mark Smith, dove into some depth about the multi-year process of implementing end-to-end call encryption. Long story short, 2024 saw the introduction of DAVE (no, not that one), Discord's very own encryption protocol. If you'd like to take a closer look at DAVE (still not that one), Discord has made it open-source via GitHub.

Smith explains, "We began migrating calls on desktop and mobile and started proving that E2EE could operate at Discord's scale without compromising the experience people expect from us."

Then in 2025, DAVE was extended to every remaining Discord platform, such as the browser-based app and console-based apps. Smith writes, "At the beginning of March 2026, we completed that migration."

That's the briefest of overviews, but already hints at what a social beast Discord has become, and just how many moving parts this migration had to account for. "The thing that makes Discord's voice and video infrastructure unusual isn't just scale — it's diversity," Mark Smith writes, "A single Discord call can have someone on a laptop, someone on their phone, someone on a PlayStation, someone on an Xbox, and someone in a web browser, all in the same conversation at the same time."

He goes on to add, "Every one of those participants expects Discord’s high-quality, low-latency communications, regardless of what device they're on. Building an E2EE protocol that works seamlessly across all of those surfaces simultaneously is, to my knowledge, unlike anything else that's been shipped. DAVE is likely one of the internet’s most platform-diverse E2EE voice and video implementations."

It's definitely an impressive project that represents a recommitment to user privacy. You may remember that the embattled social platform experienced a lot of pushback over proposed age verification measures, particularly after the potential exposure of 70,000 users' personal data in a data breach last year.

Though the platform has delayed rolling out age checks globally in light of criticism, the platform has already deployed age verification in the UK in accordance with local law there (though critics argue the platform did not need to comply in advance). As a long-time user in the UK, I've managed to avoid these latest checks. All the same, here's hoping that the user privacy win of end-to-end encryption isn't soon undone by poorly implemented age checks in the near future.

Valve stuck its oar in the tides of history yesterday, performing a spring clean of Steam's user-tagging system that added 17 new tags and removed 28 old ones. Most importantly, of course, it finally settled the debate as to what the hell we all call the "Vampire Survivors-like" genre, but it also notably excised the "RPGMaker" tag, which players have long stuck on games made using RPG Maker dev tools or that look like they were made using those tools.

And, strangely enough, RPG Maker devs seem pretty happy about it.

Not everyone is psyched, of course—"why would you remove rpgmaker are you fucking insane" lamented one dev on Bluesky in the wake of Steam's update—but visit hubs of RPG Maker development and you'll mostly find devs feeling very sanguine about the whole thing.

"To be honest I think [the RPGMaker tag] was probably doing more harm than good," wrote one RPG Maker MZ dev on Reddit. "Those who avoid RPG Maker games due to some preconception, possibly based on shovelware or RPG Maker 'slop', may then find one that they indeed like if they can't exclude it from tags."

Exclusion is the other side of the coin with Steam's tag system. While you can use tags to narrow games down—to hunt for certain kinds of games that fill whatever niche a particular tag denotes—you can also use them to mark exclusions. Never want to see a sports game? Just nix the tag. Tired of seeing exotic fetish content in Steam's most popular upcoming list? Blacklist the "Sexual content" tag. Though joke's on you in that instance: everything is someone's exotic fetish.

Plenty of players across the years have applied just this kind of exclusion to the RPGMaker tag. It's not unreasonable: a lot of dreadful shovelware gets produced and sold using those tools. But the drawback is that all the genuinely cool and exciting work gets hidden from users too, including a lot of stuff that isn't even made with RPG Maker—these tags are applied based on vibes, not on concrete analysis.

So although users who genuinely used the RPGMaker tag to find cool games made using those tools are rather upset, I get the impression devs making these games consider it a worthwhile tradeoff to resurface the stuff they make. "Happy to see the tag removed," writes another Reddit user, "as I'm sure due to the high amount of low effort crap, it did the good games more harm than good."

Even the official RPG Maker forums seem to lean positive: "I think it's good," writes one user. "I honestly felt that tag helped, at least in some small part, creating the negative perception around RPG Maker during its heyday around the Steam Greenlight era."

But do pour one out for those players who can no longer easily find new RPG Maker games on Steam itself. "Steam really removed the rpgmaker tag because it was 'too broad' and then they add a fucking tag for capybaras," says one. "Fuck you steam."