The Groovy bot has been providing countless hours of music to gamers' Discord chatrooms, but that may be coming to an end.
Google's YouTube platform has issued a cease-and-desist order to the bot's creator, PCGamer reports. Discord provides some serious means of connecting with friends, families, and even co-workers. Custom-made bots can provide some extra functionality to the platform, and Nik Ammerlaan made the Groovy bot as a convenient way to add some music into chat channels.
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The Groovy bot allows users to request songs and have the bot create a queue. It pulls the audio from various streaming audio and video platforms, including YouTube, and then play that audio into the Discord voice channel. The catch: Groovy wasn't playing advertisements that make money for the actual content providers.
In the case of YouTube content, this is a breach of Google's Terms of Service, modifying the service and using it for commercial purposes, a YouTube spokesperson has said in a statement to The Verge.
The Groovy bot service has been installed on more than 16 million servers, but that's all coming to an end on August 30. Groovy's creator is planning to comply with the cease-and-desist order and end its service on August 30. The
The end of Groovy bot
The creator of Groovy bot admitted to The Verge that the vast majority of tracks played through the bot were coming from YouTube, so even though the service also supports audio from Spotify, Soundcloud, and more, it won't try to rely on those services to continue operating. Ammerlaan plans to issue refunds to anyone who had a paid subscription extending beyond the August 30 service cutoff.
For Google's part, the move makes sense. Discord has grown into a highly valuable company offering services that compete directly with some of Google's own. The company has been valued at approximately $10 billion and eyed for acquisition by Microsoft. There'd be little sense in Google allowing this competing service to offer features that leverage Google's resources without any compensation to Google.
For now, Discord users may be able to turn to the Rhythm bot, which is still operational. But, with Google cracking down on the smaller Groovy bot, it may just be a matter of time before Rhythm bot gets the same treatment. If all the bots go, perhaps we can all just grab USB mics and make our own music in Discord.
