Sony Interactive Entertainment has invested a minority stake in the popular communication app Discord, SIE president Jim Ryan announced today in a blog post. The companies plan to “bring the Discord and PlayStation experiences closer together on console and mobile starting early next year.”
Sony didn’t detail much about what it plans to do with Discord—the popular messaging app that boasts more than 100 million active monthly users—with Ryan writing that “our teams are already hard at work connecting Discord with your social and gaming experience on PlayStation Network.” While PlayStation has its own dedicated voice chat, there’s no official method for chatting with others in cross-platform play on a system level. Some kind of integration—whether that’s a fully-fledged Discord on PlayStation, or simply the ability to use the app’s voice chat across different platforms—could be a big help toward bridging the crossplay gap.
To do all this, Ryan writes that “Sony Interactive Entertainment has made a minority investment as part of Discord’s Series H round” but didn’t disclose the amount of the company’s investment.
In March, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft angled to purchase Discord for more than $10 billion. Last month, according to The Wall Street Journal, those talks were called off, as Discord repositions itself for an initial public offering. According to a TechCrunch report from late last year, Discord was recently valued at $7 billion.
Neither Discord nor Sony immediately responded to a request for comment.