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LATEST NEWS

Chris Bratton - Tech Journalist

Most popular place for virtual hangout, Discord is on sale for $10 billion and Microsoft is interest

Earlier this week we had the potential exclusive dealing news in hand that, Microsoft Corp. is in talks to sign an exclusive deal with popular messaging platform Discord. The meeting advanced as discord announced that they are looking for a potential buyer and will be sold to the highest bidder. One of the big fish of the tech world, Microsoft couldn’t resist the temptation to acquire the platform. Discord is a very successful platform mainly used by gamers and also gives easier connectivity access to general users. Remember those days when Skype was very popular and had its peak user-base? Discord is similar in popularity and productivity, but following today’s world.



Why Discord?

Discord has more than 140 million active user communities. As a chat app, by no means it’s a small number. Discord is home to gamers, students, and overall people who want to stay connected. It has dedicated voice servers and free services. Unlike Skype where one has to call the other person and the receiver has to grant access or answer the call. Discord app uses the same formula in a different matter. People can hop in a voice server and others can join in. Without the formality of a real call. All these are free of charge. Which made it a casual home for gatherings. Discord is not only used for chatting but also for sharing streams, files, etc. Also has a great community and official serves that people joined discord for. Making it an ideal hotspot of a growing community.


Microsoft acquired Skype in May 2011. Gradually it became a huge disaster as Microsoft failed to accommodate the hype. The Wall Street Journal reported that the app, originally favoured by gamers, is initially up for sale and the news is out for quite some time. The San Francisco-based company is sawed huge success from launch and the pandemic is another reason that boosted the number in the community. The pandemic caused many people to work from home and play more games in their free time. And this caused a huge boost in community growth.


Azure and AWS

We’ve seen a silent rivalry between the cloud services provided by both Microsoft and Amazon. Microsoft cloud service Azure has been powering popular servers. Minecraft is one of them. One of the great acquisitions by Microsoft is Minecraft itself. Which has millions of active players. Microsoft moved all of its services to an Azure-based platform from AWS.

Many are still concerned if Microsoft will be able to cope with the global community as most of them blame Microsoft for not supporting Skype well.


Like many other networking and communication platforms, Discord has its racial slurs, toxicity, bots, hacking and malicious group prevention methods that are kind of getting the job done. But we expect that Microsoft will be able to bring a slight modification to the venture and make things more accurate.


Another assumption we expect is that Microsoft will let discord perform as a solo platform rather than being all Microsft’y! As the platform is growing rapidly at its own pace and Microsoft want to acquire a greater community, we hope it would be the best decision. But discord will benefit from the acquisition also. Microsoft is home to the best software engineers, designers, lawyers, marketers available on the planet.


New Plans Ahead

If the acquisition is successful, we may see a crossover with Xbox and Discord soon. As Xbox has quite an active community. There is a chance that people can have Discord premium features included on the same pass they buy for Xbox. Google & Facebook all have their community and personal services that they are popular for. Microsoft plans to have one also. But it shouldn’t be a small one and must meet the scaling quality. With a market value capping over $1.7 trillion, Microsoft surely can afford anything that goes with its plan. They previously discussed buying TikTok, another high-profile app but later decided the standards are not quite right for Microsoft. As Facebook has its messaging platform like messenger and WhatsApp, and the number is only going to increase and they will do more business on them. It surely is high time for Microsoft to try bringing change in their system to cope with the competition.


Xbox became more respected among gamers when they bought Bethesda and the company still produced sill games. Bethesda, Skype, Minecraft are Microsoft’s attempts to gather more people under their roof. Mixer, was a potential competitor for Twitch, was a total failure and Microsoft shut the service down permanently and for their last stage, spent huge amounts of cash to sponsor popular streamers and content creators. Unfortunately, they closed the service on July 22nd. And at the same time, all the existing partners of the platform were moved either to Facebook gaming or returned to Twitch. Now let’s wait and see what the acquisition results turn into. As some of us spend a good amount of time in Discord, we are the people who will be affected directly by the new contract.

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