Discord Inc is exploring a sale valuing at more than 10billion

[Stahlmann]

Personally i never saw the appeal with Discord anyway. I like Teamspeak. Simple, no unneeded features, and does exactly what it's supposed to: Voice chat.

Discord is just too much "social-media-like" imo.

[Master Delta Chief]

55 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

there is everything wrong with "factchecking", as most "fact checkers" are quite partisan entities, people are better of doing their own research

I hope you realize that what you're saying is false, right? People doing their own research tend to end up in failures and fall into conspiracies. There are already huge examples of these which I won't get into because they're political in nature. 

[Taf the Ghost]

Was fun while it lasted.

[kelvinhall05]

51 minutes ago, Stahlmann said:

Personally i never saw the appeal with Discord anyway. I like Teamspeak. Simple, no unneeded features, and does exactly what it's supposed to: Voice chat.

Discord is just too much "social-media-like" imo.

For most people, Discord is not voice chat platform with text support, it's the other way around.

[rcmaehl]

Microsoft Teams integration when?

[Taf the Ghost]

Oh, it's apparently Microsoft. 

[Heliian]

10 billion buys a lot of user data these days.

 

Can we go back to mirc now?

[Orcblood]

I def could see Amazon. If Facebook buys them, I'm for sure leaving. Any other company I could probably stay but Facebook is just not worth supporting. 

 

Guilded is a good alternative it seems. I've used it. Functions & looks like alot like discord. Just doesn't have the userbase but that can change. As someone who uses Telegram and Signal daily I'm not sure why people are suggesting those two. To me they aren't currently close to what Discord or Guilded provides. 

[Doobeedoo]

Hopefully not someone would we really wish they don't buy it but rather someone new, not messing it up.

[flibberdipper]

12 hours ago, Hymenopus_Coronatus said:

If it's Microsoft I'm okay with it. Their acquisition of GitHub went well and they even made private repositories free!

 

I was nervous about that but honestly GitHub stayed the same with some improvements.

I'm pretty okay with it too, on one condition. I want to see a proper client for the XB1/XBS consoles. Text, voice, streaming, and being able to share captures (just screenshots would make sense given how awful the trimming is on Xbox compared to the PS4/5).

 

It'd be pretty liiiiiiiiiit

[Drama Lama]

15 hours ago, Tieox said:

Assuming the worst for a moment if you would.  What client would people jump to?

reject Discord 

return to teamspeak

[Doobeedoo]

So potentially MS then.
Microsoft's reportedly in talks to acquire Discord for more than $10 billion | OC3D News (overclock3d.net)

Microsoft and others in talks to acquire Discord for as much as $10 billion | KitGuru

Report: Microsoft is in talks to buy Discord for over $10 billion | PCWorld

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-rumored-be-talks-buy-discord-more-10-billion

Microsoft reportedly in talks to acquire Discord for over $10 billion | TechSpot

[pythonmegapixel]

An acquisition by MS would be an interesting twist, because they already have not one but TWO platforms which could be said to compete with it - Teams and Skype. 

 

I wonder if they might use it to try and lock people in. Kill the MacOS and Linux clients, so gamers feel even more forced to use Windows than they do already. (That said, MS seem a lot more open about supporting other platforms than they were a few years ago, and also the web app has basically complete feature parity, but still...)

[Drama Lama]

Good things Microsoft could do when buying Discord: Integration with Xbox ( and Teams and Skype i personally care only about the first point)

 

bad things Microsoft could do: ending support for the Linux and MacOS clients , Data combination 

[StDragon]

14 hours ago, StDragon said:

Micro$oft, and it will be integrated in with Teams. Or it could be Slack because it's basically that anyways. 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-23/microsoft-said-to-be-in-talks-to-buy-discord-for-more-than-10b

 

Teams it is. You're a Team player, right gamer?

[MultiGamerClub]

3 hours ago, agatong55 said:

Because Discord and Xbox are already partners so why not just buy them and do a full integration 

Didnt know that, that could be interesting to try.

 

Don't think its support on the 360 tho

[Victor_J]

2 hours ago, pythonmegapixel said:

they already have not one but TWO platforms which could be said to compete with it - Teams and Skype. 

Aren't you forgetting about Kaizala (lol)?

 

I see a lot of potential for Microsoft in this, assuming the acquisition happens:

 

I suspect that Microsoft is going to carry on with the Rule of Two. Skype for Business is being sunset this summer in favor of Teams on the enterprise end, and with it a lot of the the financial motivation to develop the general Skype platform further disappears. So Microsoft might be looking to discontinue Skype as a whole, but it has a massive userbase it would like to retain. Teams has been developed with the office environment in mind, so it has a lot of features regular people don't want. What is a more laid back version of Teams? Discord. Or rather Teams comes off as a version of Discord wearing a suit and tie, and that has O365 integration.

 

So if Microsoft buys up Discord they have a already successful communication platform they can push the non-business Skype crowd toward (although I think it'd take developing a Discord Lite/Simple app to be successful in that regard). Once that is done the Skype brand can be scrapped completely and Microsoft has two communication platforms again, one for business and one for the public, that can probably share a good amount of tech/infrastructure/support (some massive back-end work permitting).

 

As for the gaming side of things, I wouldn't be surprised if the Xbox environment's social features and Discord pretty much merged completely over time. With this new generation, Xbox has been pushing cross platform (at least between Xbox consoles and PC) hard with the insane value proposition that is Gamepass. What would help that a lot in that regard would be better social integration between the platforms. Sure, it's far from impossible to get it working today, but what if you could just get it seamlessly? You open a game on your PC and your friend starts the same game on their Xbox, both of you with Discord running in the background with no extra hassle.

 

The social space is also somewhere Xbox can gain a lot of ground on Steam. People have had Steam accounts for years and probably have all their friends that they like to play with there. Thing is, they probably don't use Steams social features completely. They're probably friends on Discord as well, and use it for in-game communication. If people are staying on Steam to keep in touch with their gaming friends, Microsoft now has the chance to bring a lot of them over all at once to the Xbox environment (or at least putting it only one or two clicks away) instead of hoping they come over one after another.

 

The downsides I see is that if a massive company like Microsoft buys Discord I suspect there will be a rather sharp drop off of people paying for stuff like Nitro and the possibility of stricter moderation. A large part of the existing userbase will inevitably be pissed.

[suicidalfranco]

Welp time to uninstall discord

[pythonmegapixel]

1 hour ago, Victor_J said:

Once that is done the Skype brand can be scrapped completely and Microsoft has two communication platforms again, one for business and one for the public, that can probably share a good amount of tech/infrastructure/support (some massive back-end work permitting).

Indeed, this is almost exactly what I think will happen.

 

It's been clear for years now that Skype is on borrowed time. I think it started when Microsoft ended support for the lightweight and well-thought-out clients developed natively for each platform, and replaced them with the current clunky monster of an application (which uses Electron, a famously inefficient framework) - it was under the guise of being a better user experience, but in reality it was almost certainly because it's much cheaper to develop that way. This - to the surprise of nobody - pissed a lot of users off, and along with Skype's general failure to keep up with the quality and reliability that newer competitors could offer, led a lot of people to seek alternative platforms to switch to.

 

This, in turn, means that the Skype brand has a rather poor reputation at this point, and it seems logical to me that Microsoft would want to be rid of it. 

 

However, there are a couple of things which I think are noteworthy here:

 

• Firstly, Microsoft are now pushing Teams as a platform for non-business users as well. Visit the Teams homepage and the second marketing tagline is "Teams is for everyone".
   
• Secondly, Discord, as a brand and as a platform, doesn't really appeal to average non-techy users. Everything from the quirky purple branding, to the complex feature-set which requires a lot of playing with to take proper advantages of, to the "gamery" references in the settings menus (though admittedly those have been toned down a little of late) are targeting a very specific demographic.
  
  When I think of the home version of Skype, I think of maybe a brief video call for someone to catch up with their family.
  But when I think of Discord, I think of groups of friends playing multiplayer games together, possibly for hours on end, or even massive servers with thousands of members connecting across the globe.
   
• Thirdly, Teams actually seems to use the same backend as Skype. (Fun fact! Teams actually reuses many of the old Skype sound effects, and the script for the test call message!) (Another fun fact! if you connect to a Teams call on Linux, the process for it is actually called "skype").
   
• And fourthly - Microsoft has always liked to keep its gaming products separate from everything else. For example, most of the gaming-oriented features on Windows are under the XBox brand, even though they're on a PC.

Therefore I predict the segregation will be slightly different:

• Teams will be the new Skype. Most of its income will be from businesses, but it will also be available for home use. I imagine most of its userbase will be people who are already familiar with it from their workplace and want a simple solution that they know how to use.
   
• Discord will go back to targeting gamers and enthusiasts. I would expect it to replace the existing chat functionality on Xbox, possibly even acquire Xbox branding, and get significantly greater integration with Microsoft-owned games.

Of course, all of this could be completely wrong, but whatever.

[Middcore]

27 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

Indeed, this is almost exactly what I think will happen.

 

It's been clear for years now that Skype is on borrowed time. I think it started when Microsoft ended support for the lightweight and well-thought-out clients developed natively for each platform, and replaced them with the current clunky monster of an application (which uses Electron, a famously inefficient framework) - it was under the guise of being a better user experience, but in reality it was almost certainly because it's much cheaper to develop that way. This - to the surprise of nobody - pissed a lot of users off, and along with Skype's general failure to keep up with the quality and reliability that newer competitors could offer, led a lot of people to seek alternative platforms to switch to.

 

This, in turn, means that the Skype brand has a rather poor reputation at this point, and it seems logical to me that Microsoft would want to be rid of it. 

 

Agreed. I used Skype a lot taking online classes when I started college - 15 years ago. Now the only time I think of it is when I notice it's installed by default with Windows 10 and laugh. 

 

Skype's heyday was when the entire idea of "a phone call through the internet" was an exciting novelty to most people, and the other VOIP players were targeting the gamer niche like TeamSpeak and Ventrilo. Now VOIP is ho-hum, Skype has been totally surpassed by competitors for business or general use, and it never had much of a foothold in the gamer space. It's neither here nor there. 

 

 

Quote

 

• Secondly, Discord, as a brand and as a platform, doesn't really appeal to average non-techy users. Everything from the quirky purple branding, to the complex feature-set which requires a lot of playing with to take proper advantages of, to the "gamery" references in the settings menus (though admittedly those have been toned down a little of late) are targeting a very specific demographic.

 

Not to mention (yes I'm harping on this again) the self-consciously edgy name "Discord" itself. 

 

Quote

When I think of the home version of Skype, I think of maybe a brief video call for someone to catch up with their family.

 

God knows I wish I could convince my elderly relatives to join a family Discord server instead of communicating almost exclusively through Facebook Messenger as they do now, it's my last major reason for keeping Facebook. 

[Maatstaaf]

Can't imagine Nitro memberships are worth 10 billion. 

 

Whoever ends up buying Discord is most likely going to sell the data, where else will they profit from?

[SurvivorNVL]

This is why I deleted my discord and explicitly demanded my data wiped awhile ago.  Fully expected them to sell out eventually and whoever buys them, isn't buying in to the idea of the platform or in to anything other than the massive data collection it provides.  Matrix+Teamspeak serves my needs just fine enough.  Though it would be kind of fun to see if Microsoft does buy Discord; I remember monitoring skype and watching it send data to India constantly when I had it fifteen years ago.  

[Jay427]

On 3/22/2021 at 6:13 PM, JoltEnergy said:

My thoughts

 

 I hope to see discord get any funding that it may need but worry about someone like facebook taking control.

Exactly that.  If Discord gets bought out, then it's a dead platform until someone makes a new one.

[pythonmegapixel]

There has been much speculation that any new owner of Discord would drop the commitment not to show advertising, and try to monetize that way.

 

How you could put ads onto a platform which spends so much of use minimised with someone connected to a voice channel, I don't know. Short of disconnecting everyone every hour and forcing them to watch an ad to reconnect, maybe? I hope not...

[Mark Kaine]

On 3/22/2021 at 11:48 PM, ARikozuM said:

It's either Facebook, Microsoft, or Amazon. 

it's going to be Google . 

 

 

5 hours ago, Jay427 said:

Exactly that.  If Discord gets bought out, then it's a dead platform until someone makes a new one.

 

Which incidentally is precisely the reason to buy it, to kill it off (silently of course)