Microsoft eyes Discord

Last year, same time.

As initial excitement of staying home subsided and boredom started kicking in, Like the most people, I resorted to playing online games with friends. During the next few weeks, we hopped off one game to another, but what remained constant are my pyjamas and Discord app.

Discord, a video game-centric chat, offers voice, video, and text as well as gamer-friendly features to help gamers communicate with their community while streaming. It became a go-to online community for people who are looking for a place to talk or chat. A user can belong to more than one server, e.g., one private server where he hangs out with his friend, plus couple of public servers, one to discuss stock market tips and one to discuss about his favorite IPL franchisee.

Discord claims doubled monthly users with more than 140 million monthly users and reported over $100 million during the last year. It has raised c.$480 million and doubled its valuation to $7 billion last December.

Though the app rose to popularity riding on the success of online multiplayer games, it emerged as a community networking platform where like-minded people gather to discuss. Be it book clubs, study groups, digital conventions or to bring all Thriller movie lovers to discuss their favorite movies.

In a way, Discord resembles a concoction of Clubhouse flirting with Slack. Former’s model and latter’s layout to bring communities to “discuss”.

With growing hype around voice-based social networks, Discord can mean more than just chat for gamers in the days to come. Discord’s growth is driven by its lack of advertisements, instead it offers subscription service, named Nitro, wherein users can customize their avatar, tag, emoji apart from better file uploads and stream at higher video quality. Basically, the paid subscription is for video game users.

It is exciting to see what Discord will charge for other users going forward. Something like Slack, where you can see old messages only if you are premium user? Maybe.

From news that is circulating, Microsoft is considering offering $ 10 billion to buy Discord. As Microsoft hopes with Discord’s users help Xbox to overtake its arch nemesis Sony’s PlayStation as preferred gaming console. Microsoft hopes integrating Discord will boost its Xbox sales while also gaining invaluable insights into what gaming community is looking for. The insights can help them build better games and brace itself in the gaming arena which is expected to gain steam with Google’s stadia joining the party.

Microsoft missed acquiring Social-media app, TikTok, last year and its talks to acquire Pinterest fell apart. It was successful in acquiring few video game makers, recently ZeniMax for $7.5 billion in September last year.

Will it be successful in acquiring Discord or Discord would like to go public than sell it out?

Or most importantly, if acquired, Microsoft will make it successful or will Discord become another Skype?

Interesting questions to unfold!