Sony Partners With Discord To Leverage Social Platform On PlayStation 5
In late April, Microsoft’s Discord acquisition dreams were dashed after talks came to a screeching halt. Though any hopes of a buyout were gone, Discord was still looking for funding evidently, as it has now been announced the Sony and Discord are new partners. Perhaps this is a way to make Microsoft jealous, but it seems to be a solidly beneficial partnership, nonetheless.
Back in 2015, Discord was created by founders Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy, who sought a way to keep in touch with friends made over the internet. They believed they could make a better service that was not “slow, unreliable, and complex,” and thus Discord was born. Since then, gamers have taken it up as the de facto standard for communication behind the former reigning platform Teamspeak. This year, however, many more people began to use Discord as all of us transitioned online for work, school, and play. Despite that, Discord is still a platform for gaming and gamers at heart, and so a Sony partnership could be quite good.
According to a blog post by Sony president and CEO Jim Ryan, this partnership will allow Sony to connect “Discord with your social and gaming experience on PlayStation Network.” This will bring the Discord and PlayStation experiences closer on console and mobile starting next year. Then it will be much easier for “friends, groups, and communities to hang out, have fun, and communicate more easily while playing games together.”
Perhaps we will see a dedicated Discord app come to PlayStation, or maybe a direct integration to the PlayStation itself. Either way, Microsoft is on the sidelines for this, and not having a Discord partnership such as this could be viewed as a drawback. This could bring Microsoft back to the table as an investor such as Sony is now, but we will have to see. Thus, stay tuned to HotHardware as Discord becomes more of a hot commodity than ever before.
