How to turn of the new Game Overlay feature on Discord (March 2025)
I just want to see the game, not my face
If you ever play games while in video or voice chats with friends on Discord, then you may have noticed something fun (read: annoying) that came with the latest update to Discord in March 2025 — the “improved” Game Overlay feature.
I know, technology and apps are always progressing and changing, updating in ways that we probably don’t expect, but that doesn’t mean we have to like all of the changes. The March update to Discord is proving… Controversial among users, and I for one don’t like the new less rounded appearance, but it’s the Game Overlay that really puts me off.
As someone who takes screenshots of games as part of my job, I need to make sure that they’re clean and crisp. Having my video down in the bottom-left corner of screenshots is not ideal, so off goes the Overlay.
How to turn off Game Overlay in Discord
It’s actually a pretty simple task. Just open up Discord, and press the Settings button next to your name in the bottom-left corner of the Discord window. Then, scroll down the left sidebar until you find “Game Overlay” under Activity Settings.
Here, you can turn off both the new Overlay and the Legacy Overlay (the one that puts the name of people in a call in the top-left corner of the screen), leaving your game clear of any Discord-based interruptions.
If you don’t want to turn it off entirely, but want it to be a little less intrusive, you can also tweak the settings to make it suit your needs. You can change the size of icons, and whether any elements of the overlay can be clicked on if they appear (such as message notifications).
If you want it to come up on only select games, you can also click the arrow beside “Enable Overlay” to manually select which games will allow for the Overlay to appear:
