Discord has become a central artery for gaming. It’s the default place for companies to build communities around their games and for the people who play them to hang out with one another, coordinate gaming sessions, or just shoot the shit about whatever’s going on in life. It’s one of the least crappy social media platforms out there right now, but it might not stay that way for long.
The New York Times reports that Discord’s founders are meeting with investment bankers in preparation for a possible IPO as early as this year. While plans can always change, what that means right now is that the meeting place for 200 million monthly users, over 90 percent of whom use it for gaming, is exploring going from a private company to a public one ruled by the founding principle of the stock market: number must go up.
“We understand there is a lot of interest around Discord’s future plans, but we do not comment on rumors or speculation,” a spokesperson for the company told The New York Times. “Our focus remains on delivering the best possible experience for our users and building a strong, sustainable business.”
Discord was released in 2015 by founders Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy. After shipping a MOBA royale on iPad called Fates Forever in 2014 that never took off, they pivoted to making communications platform for online gamers. Online games were exploding at the time and the tools for communicating in them were pretty bad. Discord filled the void when it came to coordinating raids in Final Fantasy XIV or ganks in Dota 2.
It eventually became a one-stop shop for gaming conversations online, offering an alternative to boring, stilted workplace productivity tools like Skype and Slack, as well as archaic gaming forums, and fire-hose social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Discord is now fully-integrated on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, and serves as a better solution to Nintendo Switch’s terrible voice chat app, and the frustrating hiccups of cross-platform party chat. Powering this takeover has been the fact 1) Discord works and 2) the majority of its features are entirely free.
Going public could change all of that. We’ve seen the playbook before. Tech company woos hundreds of millions of users with a great product that’s practically free, and then once they’re locked into the platform through history, network effects, or just old habit, squeezes as much financial value out of the thing by making it worse in almost every way possible. If this were A Christmas Carol and Discord was Ebenezer Scrooge then Facebook would be the Jacob Marley shaking its chains in the chat app’s face.
This is what the author Cory Doctorow has dubbed enshittification. Online products and services get worse over time as the companies behind them are forced to extract more and more value no matter the long-terms costs. Being private doesn’t make a company immune from this, but going public certainly has the potential to be like throwing TNT into a dumpster fire. This shift was already evident in Discord—see its embrace of online advertising just last year—but seems only likely to worsen with a potential IPO payout looming overhead. Look no farther then Reddit’s road to going public, paved with generative-AI deals and API price hikes.
The increasing enshittification of Discord is even more worrying. It’s now the defacto town square for many of the biggest games around, from Marvel Rivals to Helldivers 2. Rockstar Games just launched its own Discord channel in preparation for Grand Theft Auto VI, likely to be the biggest game launch ever when it arrives later this year. The price of exiting the platform if features get worse or locked behind a paywall is only going up. And any communities that do leave will have to leave their pasts behind, sealed off like The Cask of Amontillado from the rest of the internet. Discord’s separation from that crumbling infrastructure has long been one of its greatest virtues, making it feel like a relative safe heaven from SEO spam and algorithmic churn. It could one day make it feel more like a tomb.
High on a pandemic-fueled influx of new users, Discord once flirted with growing beyond its gaming roots. There was talk of it supplanting Slack and of Microsoft buying it for a potential $6.5 billion. Then last year it promised it was getting back to basics and doubling down on its original core mission. “We believe Discord can play a uniquely important role in the future of gaming,” Citron wrote at the time. “We’re going to focus on making it easier and more fun for people to talk and hang out before, during, and after playing—and we’ll help developers of those games bring their creativity to life.”
We’ll see if that remains the case.
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