Microsoft is reportedly gearing up to acquire Discord for more than $10 billion. According to reports, Discord has reached out to potential buyers and Microsoft is one among them. The acquisition, if goes through, will set new benchmarks in the messaging segment. Discord is in talks with several companies and Microsoft is one among them. It is reliably learned that acquire Discord is looking for the highest deal. That said, Microsoft and Discord have not yet responded to media queries regarding the possible acquisition.
Discord is a VoIP, instant messaging and digital distribution platform designed for the creation of communities. As a user, you communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging including media and files in private chats. Discord has a dedicated community module called servers, which is a collection of persistent chat rooms and voice chat channels. Discord is designed to run on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, iPadOS, Linux, and all major web browsers. According to estimates, there are over 500 million users of the software.
The main concept of Discord game emerged from Jason Citron, who is the founder of OpenFeint, which is a social gaming platform for mobile games. He sold OpenFeint to GREE in 2011 for over $104 million to enter into a game development studio in 2012. He released Fates Forever in 2014, which was not commercially successful. Hammer & Chisel received additional funding from YouWeb’s 9+ incubator to develop Discord including from Benchmark Capital and Tencent.
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Microsoft had announced that the company will provide Discord support for Xbox Live users in April 2018. This allowed users to link their Discord and Xbox Live accounts, which enabled Xbox Live friends list through Discord. The company had raised $150 million in funding at an overall valuation of $2 billion.
While in April 2020, Discord changed their Twitter handle from @discordapp to @discord, the company changed the primary domain from discordapp.com to discord.com in May 2020. Discord was also under fire over several controversies. If Microsoft takes over Discord, then they will clear all the pending issues with the app including the ability to configure various modules. It takes time for Microsoft to sit and frame guidelines to reboot Discord for the creation of creative communities.
That being said, the Discord deal is not yet finalized by Microsoft. There is a possibility for some other company to buy at a higher price. Microsoft has already community app like Kaizala and the addition of Discord will be a shot in the arm for the company.
