The concept of Discord came from Jason Citron, who had founded OpenFeint, a social gaming platform for mobile games, and Stanislav Vishnevsky, who had founded Guildwork, another social gaming platform. Citron sold OpenFeint to GREE in 2011 for US$104 million,[9] which he used to found Hammer & Chisel, a game development studio, in 2012.[10] Their first product was Fates Forever, released in 2014, which Citron anticipated being the first MOBA game on mobile platforms, but it did not become commercially successful.[11]
According to Citron, during the development process, he noticed how difficult it was for his team to work out tactics in games like Final Fantasy XIV and League of Legends using available voice over IP (VoIP) software. This led to the development of a chat service with a focus on user-friendliness with minimal impact on performance.[11]
To develop Discord, Hammer & Chisel gained additional funding from YouWeb's 9+ incubator, which had also funded the startup of Hammer & Chisel, and from Benchmark Capital and Tencent.[10][12]
Discord was publicly released in May 2015 under the domain name discordapp.com.[13] According to Citron, they made no specific moves to target any specific audience, but some gaming-related subreddits quickly began to switch their IRC links with Discord links.[14] Discord became widely used by esports and LAN tournament gamers. The company benefited from relationships with Twitch streamers and subreddit communities for Diablo and World of Warcraft.[15]
In January 2016, Discord raised an additional $20 million in funding including an investment from WarnerMedia (then TimeWarner).[16] In 2019, WarnerMedia Investment Group sold its share as it was shut down following AT&T's acquisition of WarnerMedia.[17][18]
Microsoft announced in April 2018 that it will provide Discord support for Xbox Live users, allowing them to link their Discord and Xbox Live accounts so that they can connect with their Xbox Live friends list through Discord.[19]
In December 2018, the company announced it raised $150 million in funding at a $2 billion valuation. The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures, and Technology Opportunity Partners.[20]
In March 2020, Discord changed its motto from "Chat for Gamers" to "Chat for Communities and Friends", and introduced server templates. This was part of their response to an increase of users as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.[21][22]
In April 2020, Discord's Twitter username was changed from @discordapp to @discord.[23] Later in May 2020, Discord changed its primary domain from discordapp.com to discord.com.[24]
Starting in June 2020, Discord announced it was shifting focus away from video gaming specifically to a more all-purpose communication and chat client for all functions, revealing its new slogan "Your place to talk" and a revised website. Among other planned changes would be to reduce the number of gaming in-jokes it uses within the client, improving the user onboarding experience, and increasing server capacity and reliability. The company announced it had received an additional US$100 million in investments to help with these changes.
In March 2021, Discord announced it had hired its first finance chief, former head of finance for Pinterest Tomasz Marcinkowski. An inside source called this one of the first steps for the company towards a potential initial public offering, though co-founder and CEO Jason Citron stated earlier in the month he is not thinking about taking the company public. Discord doubled its monthly user base to about 140 million in 2020. The same month, Bloomberg News and The Wall Street Journal reported that several companies were looking to purchase Discord, with Microsoft named as the likely lead buyer at a value estimated at $10 billion. However, they ended talks with Microsoft, opting to stay independent. Instead, Discord launched another round of investment in April 2021. Among those investing in the company was Sony Interactive Entertainment; the company stated that they intended to integrate a portion of Discord's services into the PlayStation Network by 2022.
In May 2021, Discord rebranded its game controller-shaped logo "Clyde" in celebration of its sixth anniversary. The company also changed the color palette of its branding and user interfaces to a much more saturated one to be more "bold and playful", and changed its slogan from "your place to talk" to "imagine a place", believing that it would be easier to attach to additional taglines; these changes were met with backlash and criticism from Discord users.
Discord acquired Sentropy, a company that specialized in using artificial intelligence systems to monitor online networks for abusive messages to highlight problematic users, and provide recommendations to users for the means to block such messages or uses, in July 2021. With the acquisition, Sentropy's tools will be used exclusively for monitoring Discord servers to help with Discord's goals to prevent harassment of users.
Features
Discord is built to create and manage private and public communities. It gives users access to tools focused around communication services like voice and video calls, persistent chat rooms, and integrations with other gamer-focused services along with the general ability to send direct messages and create personal groups. Although at first, Discord services seem directed towards only gamers, in recent years, it has brought several new updates, making it more useful for the general population.
Servers
Discord communities are organized into discrete collections of channels called servers. Servers are referred to as "guilds" in the developer documentation.Users can create servers for free, manage their public visibility, and create both channels and channel categories up to 250. Any given server can have up to 800,000 members, as discovered when the official Discord server for the video game Genshin Impact reached maximum capacity.
Starting October 2017, Discord allows game developers and publishers to verify their servers. Verified servers, like verified accounts on social media sites, have badges to mark them as official communities. A verified server is moderated by its developer's or publisher's own moderation team. Verification was later extended in February 2018 to include esports teams and musical artists.
By the end of 2017, about 450 servers were verified.
Members can help servers obtain perks in 3 levels via the "Server Boost" feature, which unlocks higher quality voice channels, more emoji slots, and other perks. Users can buy boosts for servers for $4.99 a month. "Discord Nitro" subscribers get two boosts included in the price of Nitro, and 30% off for all other boosts.
In 2020, Discord unveiled a new feature, known as "Community servers". It includes such features as a custom welcome screen, server insights, and the ability to advertise on Discord's Server Discovery page.
Discord launched Stage Channels in May 2021, a feature similar to Clubhouse which allows for living, moderated channels, for audio talks, discussions, and other uses, which can further be potentially gated to only invited or ticketed users. Alongside this, users can search for relevant open Stage Channels to their interests through a Stage Discovery tool.
Channels
Channels may be either used for voice chat and streaming or for instant messaging and file sharing. The visibility and access to channels can be customized to limit access from certain users, for example, marking a channel "NSFW" (Not Safe For Work) require that first-time viewers confirm they are over 18 years old and willing to see such content.
Text channels support some rich text via a subset of the Markdown syntax. Code blocks with language-specific highlighting can also be used.
Direct messages
Direct messages in Discord allow people to text, share files, live stream and call others privately outside of servers. An added feature in Discord direct messages is the ability to create message groups of up to 10 users.This acts similar to a server's text channel, with the ability to initiate a call simultaneously for all the members in a direct message group (in servers, people can only join voice channels but cannot be called into)
User profiles
Users register for Discord with an email address and must create a username. To allow multiple users to use the same username, they are assigned a four-digit number called a "discriminator", prefixed with "#", which is added to the end of their username.
Both at the server and the user level, Discord allows users to connect these to their Twitch or other gaming service account.
Users can assign themselves a profile picture. Subscribers for Discord Nitro, part of Discord's monetization plan, can use animated profile pictures and add a profile banner image.
All users can add an About Me section to their profile.
Video calls and streaming
Video calling and screen sharing were added in October 2017, allowing users to create private video calls with up to 10 users,[51] later increased to 50 due to the increased popularity of video calling during the COVID-19 pandemic.[52]
In August 2019, this was expanded with live streaming channels in servers. A user can share their screen if Discord has detected they are playing a game and others in that channel can join the channel to watch the stream. While these features mimic the live streaming capabilities of platforms like Twitch, the company does not plan to compete with these services, believing that these features are best used by small groups.[42]
Digital distribution
In August 2018, Discord launched a games storefront beta, allowing users to purchase a curated set of games through the service.[53] This will include a "First on Discord" featured set of games that their developers attest to Discord's help in getting launched, giving these games 90 days of exclusivity on the Discord marketplace. Discord Nitro subscribers will also gain access to a rotating set of games as part of their subscription, with the price of Nitro being bumped from $4.99 to $9.99 a month.[54][55] A cheaper service called 'Nitro Classic' was also released that has the same perks as Nitro but does not include free games.
Following the launch of the Epic Games Store, which challenged Valve's Steam storefront by only taking a 12% cut of game revenue, Discord announced in December 2018 that it would reduce its own revenue cut to 10%.[56]
To further support developers, starting in March 2019 Discord gave the ability for developers and publishers that ran their own servers to offer their games through a dedicated store channel on their server, with Discord managing the payment processing and distribution. This can be used, for example, to give select users access to alpha- and beta-builds of a game in progress as an early access alternative.[57]
Also in March 2019, Discord removed the digital storefront, instead choosing to focus on the Nitro subscription and having direct sales be done through the developer's own servers.[58] In September 2019, Discord announced that it was ending its free game service October 2019 as they found too few people were playing the games offered.[59]
Developer tools
In December 2016, the company introduced its GameBridge API, which allows game developers to directly integrate with Discord within games.[60]
In December 2017, Discord added a software development kit that allows developers to integrate their games with the service, called "rich presence". This integration is commonly used to allow players to join each other's games through Discord or to display information about a player's game progression in their Discord profile.[61]
Discord also provides tools for users to create their own Internet bots.[62] There are tools such as discord.js[63] and discord.py[64] that allow bot developers to interact with the Discord API to control their bot.
Documentation for the Discord API is hosted on GitHub.[65]
Infrastructure
Discord is a persistent group chat software, based on eventually consistent database architecture.[66]
Discord uses the metaphors of servers and channels similar to Internet Relay Chat even though these servers do not map to traditional hardware or virtual servers due to their distributed nature. They are instead database entities in Discord's servers.
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