The Discord app to download from the Apple App Store.
Photographer: Tiffany Hagler-Geard / Bloomberg
Photographer: Tiffany Hagler-Geard / Bloomberg
Every two months, a social media platform catches the eye, puzzling some and confusing others. In 2020, former President Donald Trump’s campaign to ban TikTok attracted immense attention to the video app. Earlier this year, the Clubhouse gained prominence as people tourd for invitations to join chat rooms for the elite of Silicon Valley. The platform called Discord is not new, but it speaks of a $ 10 billion sale to Microsoft has been asking the world to question this video game-centric chat application.
1. What is Discord?
Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy, programmers and entrepreneurs, founded Discord, based in San Francisco in 2015, as a platform for people to chat while playing video games. The free service offers voice, video and text, as well as user-friendly features, including the ability for users to convey the name of the game they are playing. During the pandemic, with people trapped at home and playing more video games than ever before – and also looking for ways to socialize safely – Discord became a hub for communities as diverse as the Black Lives Matter movement, helps with the duty of home, book clubs and more. He started to present himself as a “place to talk”.
2. How big is that?
The site now claims to have more than 140 million monthly users and says it generated $ 100 million in revenue last year. Discord doubled its valuation last December to $ 7 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. He raised a total of about $ 480 million, according to Crunchbase, from investors, including Greenoaks Capital.
3. What is your appeal?
The app has gained popularity alongside multiplayer successes like Fortnite from Epic Games Inc. Players enjoy talking to each other while eliminating the enemy. But Discord has attracted fans beyond the players and is now positioning itself as attractive to anyone who wants to be able to explore a hive of similar interests. At Discord, anyone can create their own community or server; current servers have memberships that range from one to hundreds of thousands. A typical user can belong to a private Discord server, to go out with friends, in addition to public servers dedicated to discussing a favorite movie or sports team.
4. Why is Microsoft interested?
For Microsoft, these diverse communities can be Discord’s biggest selling point. The software giant, which last year sought to buy the social media app TikTok and held talks to acquire Pinterest Inc. has been looking for assets that provide access to thriving user communities, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. The Xbox console maker recently snapped up several video game companies, including the publisher ZeniMax Media Inc. in September for $ 7.5 billion. Microsoft may try to integrate Discord with Xbox Game Pass, its subscription service similar to Netflix for video games. But a person familiar with the talks said that Discord is more likely to go public than to sell.
5. How does Discord make money?
One of the secrets of Discord’s popularity is the lack of ads. Instead of filling channels with intrusive ads, like other social media services, like Twitter Inc., Discord makes money from a subscription service called Nitro. For $ 10 a month, members can personalize tags next to their usernames, upload larger files and stream in superior video quality.
6. What kind of problems did you have?
Discord was used as a meeting place for white nationalists to organize the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which became violent and led to the death of a counter-protester. Since then, the company has been striving to clean up its website and make it more inclusive. The coalition of investors famous for boosting GameStop’s shares on Reddit also had a Discord server, but were banned earlier this year for not doing enough to contain the hate speech.
7. Basically, is it still a player site?
It is still very popular with gamers, but people use it for all kinds of conversations, even on official video game channels. Discord has become a useful way for video game companies to promote products directly and create communities. The company will check servers based on popular video games, giving them a seal of authenticity. Some game developers participate in their Discord channels, allowing fans to interact directly with the people behind their favorite titles. The official Discord community for the successful game Among Us, for example, it has more than 413,000 users. Among the US, community director Victoria Tran described it as “very chaotic, but very fun”. She said that people use the server not only to chat about the game and find people to play with, but to have broader conversations about their lives and interests.