What is Discord? Discord Review

1. Background

The concept of Discord was conceived by Jason Citron, who founded the mobile gaming social networking platform OpenFeint, sold OpenFeint to GREE for $104 million in 2011, and used the money to create game development studio Hammer & Chisel in 2012.

The first game was Fates Forever, released in 2014. Strong expected the game to be the first multiplayer online battle arena game on mobile platforms, but it was not successful due to low popularity. However, during the development process, in order to develop a better game, Strong noticed that his team had difficulties when trying to play other popular games such as Final Fantasy XIV and League of Legends, and specifically emphasized that there were serious problems with real-time network calls.

Some online real-time chat services require players to share multiple IP addresses to make calls, while others (such as Skype or Teamspeak) are resource-intensive, which led developers to want to develop a chat software that is more user-friendly based on modern technology: Discord.

2. Development History

Discord was publicly released in May 2015. Strong pointed out that at that time, their only channel to promote Discord was the Reddit community. Soon after, it was discovered that many Reddit sub-forums preferred to use Discord servers instead of IRC servers. Later, Discord gradually became popular through the promotion of ESports, LAN parties and other streaming media such as Twitch.

In April 2018, Microsoft announced that it would provide Discord support for Xbox Live users, allowing users to link Discord and Xbox Live accounts to synchronize their friend lists. In December of the same year, Hammer & Chisel announced that it had raised $150 million in funding at a valuation of $2 billion.

Led by Greenoaks Capital, companies such as FirstMark, Tencent, IVP, and Index Ventures participated in the negotiations. After Epic Games Store only charged a 12% commission on games, challenging the Steam Store, Discord announced in October 2018 that it would reduce its commission to only 10%.

To further support game developers, starting in March 2019, Discord gave its developers and publishers the right to offer games on its servers through a dedicated store channel, with Discord responsible for post-processing and publishing.

In September 2019, Discord announced that it would end its free gaming service in October 2019, as they found that too few people were playing the games on offer. Discord's digital storefront will continue to operate.

In December 2020, Discord just completed a $100 million round of financing, with a valuation of $7 billion.

In 2021, Microsoft is in acquisition negotiations, and if the acquisition is completed, the transaction price will exceed US$10 billion.

Discord, a platform with 140 million monthly active users, annual revenue of only $130 million and continued losses, is considering going public.

3. User Development

In December 2016, the Discord team reported having 25 million users worldwide.

At the end of 2017, the service had attracted nearly 90 million users, with about 1.5 million new users added each week.

In March 2018, the Discord team said it had 130 million unique registered users on its third anniversary.

In May 2019, celebrating Discord’s fourth anniversary, the team announced that it had more than 250 million registered users across web and mobile platforms.

The team announced in May last year that it had 130 million registered users. At a press conference on the 11th, the team stated that 56 million people use the service every month and send 25 billion messages (850 million messages per day). Its seven most popular servers include: Overwatch, Spellbreak, Game for Peace, Clash of Clans: Royal War, Minecraft, ZombsRoyale.io and Rainbow Six: Siege.

4. Platform Functions

Discord started out as a gaming voice and IM tool service, then turned to a live streaming platform, and then opened a community platform for game stores, becoming the preferred tool for game players to communicate and collaborate in games.

Discord has also attracted many non-gamer users and is widely used by study groups, dance classes, book clubs and other virtual gatherings.