How does discord know what game you're playing?

General
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Where does Discord find the info on which game you’re playing, how many people are in the game, etc?

1 Like
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Hey @tomliver

Discord sets your activity status from your device’s running processes, or the specific game you’re playing. If you just see the game, it’s probably pulling from processes. If you see other info (map, party size etc.) it’s likely pulling from the game itself.

How to hide your Discord Activity:

  1. Go to Discord Settings

  2. Look for Activity Privacy (bottom of the list)

  3. For all servers: switch the “share my activity” toggle to OFF

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  4. For per-server settings: scroll down and use the toggles alongside each server.

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It is basically just peeking at your Task Manager. Discord has a massive list of filenames it recognizes, like valorant.exe, and if it sees that running on your PC it updates your status.

The cool part is ‘Rich Presence’ though. That is when the game devs actually write code to tell Discord ‘hey, he is in a ranked match on Haven.’ That is how it knows the specific details. Otherwise it is just guessing based on the file name.

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It just scans your running processes for known .exe names. You can actually use this to troll your friends lol.

If you go into User Settings > Registered Games, you can add Notepad or Chrome as a ‘game’ and then rename it to whatever you want. I used to have mine set to ‘Half-Life 3’ just to see people freak out haha

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To get specific, there are two distinct mechanisms at play here:

  1. Process Detection: The Discord client polls your local process list (PIDs) against a hashed database of known executables. If dota2.exe appears in the process tree, it triggers the status. This is purely local detection based on filenames.

  2. Rich Presence (RPC): This is an active API connection. The game developer integrates the Discord GameSDK which opens a local WebSocket connection to your Discord client. The game then pushes a JSON payload containing the specific state data like Map, Party Size, or Timestamp directly to Discord. This is why some games show detailed lobbies while others just show the title.