Discord Developer News - January 2026

Hey devs! Welcome to the January edition of Discord Developer News. As we kick off the new year, we're excited to share important updates about our Buildathon finale, new learning resources, and new account linking capabilities. Let's dive in!

🏁 Final Stretch for our DDevs 2025 Buildathon

Time is almost up! Our Buildathon wraps up on January 9th. Submit your bot, activity, or game before the deadline. Our favorites in each category will be announced on January 23.
- 👾 Check out the buildathon-submit channel in DDevs to submit

🎬 Watch Our 2025 Year in Review Event

Missed our recent 2025 Changelog live event? We've got you covered! Watch the full recording to catch up on all the updates from this year and what we’re thinking about for 2026.
- 🎥 Watch the 2025 Changelog recording

🎓 Learn to Build with the Social SDK in Unity

New to building Discord-integrated games? We've partnered with Unity Learn to create a comprehensive course that teaches you how to build games with the Discord Social SDK in Unity from the ground up.
- 📚 Take the Unity Learn course
- 🎥 Watch a live demonstration of the course

🔗 New Social SDK Guide: Account Linking from Discord

We've added a new guide showing how to enable account linking entry points within the Discord client. With Social SDK 1.6+, Discord can now display "Link your account" prompts and buttons throughout the client to encourage players to connect their game accounts, leading to higher linking rates and better social engagement.
- 📓 Read the full guide
- 🛠️ Explore the new account linking developer tools

📨 Stay Connected with Discord Developers in 2026

Join our Discord community and stay up to date on your preferred platform!
- Join the Discord Developers server
- ✉️ Subscribe to our Discord Developers email newsletter
- Follow @DiscordDevelopers on YouTube
- Follow Discord Developers on LinkedIn

glhf!
Your Discord Developer team

Discord Developer 2025 Year in Review: Social SDK, New Components, ...

Join the Discord DevRel team for our final DDevs Change Log event of 2025! We’re recapping a massive year for the developer community and looking ahead at what’s coming in 2026.

In this video, we cover:
- Discord Checkpoint 2025: A look at the massive stats across the platform, including over 700 billion messages sent this year.
- Developer...