Microsoft about to acquire Discord for more than 10 billion USD

Discord has been successful enough in reaching out to its potential buyers and Microsoft has been reported to be one of them. According to a Bloomberg report which has cited people that are familiar with the topic, it is said that Microsoft Corporation is currently in talks to acquire a messaging platform called Discord for more than about 10 billion USD. Earlier that day, the reports from VentureBeat explained that Discord has seen to have explored a sale and that it was in finalizing talks with a party. Reuters tried to enquire both Microsoft and Discord regarding the same, however, it was seen that both the companies refused to comment on this topic.

So, What Is Discord Exactly?
Discord was launched initially to unite gamers and to build a community and chat, and the app was launched in the year 2015. But now if we look at it, the platform has not remained limited to just the gamers community. It has gone from being a platform for gamers to a platform for creating a community for anyone and everyone who has the same interest in a particular subject matter. Simply, Discord is a messaging app that allows people to communicate using various channels. Through the app, people can send video and text messages and media items such as photos and videos. Every server has multiple channels and each of those channels has got its topics and subject matters and individual rules, making every channel open for different and multiple types of discussions ranging from gaming, sports, music, art, literature, films to anything and everything. The most exciting part of this website is that all the servers that we create are free of cost. This is similar to Reddit on so many levels in terms of building communities for different interest areas and it can accommodate a wide range of interests. People usually find their best servers or the servers based on their interests by searching it on google or directly putting in the keywords in the search function provided by the platform. The platform can be used as both a mobile application or as a desktop/ PC application. The platform also allows you to connect your Youtube or Spotify account to give you a better overall experience. Apart from all of this, the platform also allows the users to change the setting in which they want to use the platform in terms of a private or a public sector. Users can assign roles and authority to other users with the help of certain functions in this app, this comes with certain name tags. These roles become helpful in bigger and more diversified communities as it helps in better administration and moderation in the server. Apart from providing a community-level chat service, discord also provides a personal one-to-one chat service wherein two individuals can also get to know each other well and become friends.

History Of Discord
According to the CEO of Discord Jason Citron, we have many other apps that can e used while playing online games such as Facetime, Skype, etc but it is also noticed that when we are playing PC games and we want to accept a call on skype or Facetime, it just disrupts the game flow and minimizes the tab so that we can accept the call. However, with discord the thing is completely different, it is more like a conference call that always stays on within servers and while playing the game so you can continue playing the game while being on call with the community members without having anyone disrupt the game.

Earlier, however, Discord was just about a gaming studio that had a multiplayer gamer with a voice function that could be used during games to communicate. This developing stage of such a gaming studio, made the team of Discord realize that it is difficult to bring in voice chat functions within multiplayer games and this was when they started working towards resolving this issue.
The CEO of the company believes that communication through voice channels while playing games is important to both the professional players and the people who just want to have a good time playing competitive games with their friends and families. Competitive games like these involve members communicating with each other to discuss their strategies and game plan effectively. A lot of these important things in the gaming sector were not targeted by the market until Discord paved its way into the gaming market.

Rise of Discord In The Market
As the Chief Marketing Officer has explained, the app was initially launched for him and his friend so that they can play Fornite on weekends. From that point in time, the reach of the application grew massively, the number of messages sent through the app rose to 15 billion in 2018 from 6 billion in 2017. Discord provides a more private social networking experience in terms of the fact that it does not keep a track of your every single move when you are on that platform, unlike many other social media platforms. This makes the platform so much different from any other social media platform. The Chief Marketing Officer also explained that the platform is completely social as it needs at least two people to make it work. It is more or less a social media platform, the only difference is that it provides a better social media networking experience with a certain amount of privacy in terms of providing a private space for chatting and building communities. People have to create a link to build a community or need to have a certain link to enter a specific community. This makes it impossible for spam users to enter anyone’s community server, providing a level of comfort to its users in terms of privacy.

With the pandemic, more and more people have been indulging in online games and have started using Discord to communicate with their teammates. This has massively increased the reach of the platform.