Superfighters Wiki:Discord

Discord is a proprietary freeware VoIP application designed for gaming communities. Discord runs on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Linux, and in a web browser. As of May 2017, Discord has over 45 million users.

History
The concept of Discord came from Jason Citron, who had founded OpenFeint, a social gaming platform for mobile games. He eventually sold OpenFeint to GREE for $104 million in 2011, which he used to found Hammer & Chisel, a game development studio, 2012. Their original product was Fates Forever released in 2014, which Citron anticipated to be the first MOBA game on mobile platforms. While Fates Forever was not commercially successful due to low popularity, Citron noted the difficulties that his team had in building the game when trying to play other representative games like Final Fantasy XIV and League of Legends to work out gameplay concepts, specifically highlighting issues of current Voice over IP options that were available: some VoIP options required players to share various IP addresses just to connect, while other services like Skype or TeamSpeak were resource-heavy and had known security issues. This led the developers towards developing a chat service that was much friendlier to use based on more modern technology.

To develop Discord, Hammer & Chisel gained additional funding from YouWeb's 9+ incubator, who had also funded the startup of Hammer & Chisel, and from Benchmark capital and Tencent.

The public release of Discord was in May 2015. According to Citron, the only area that they pushed Discord into was for the Reddit communities, finding that many subreddit forums were replacing IRC servers with Discord ones. Discord became popular through eSports and LAN tournament gamers and through other Twitch.tvstreamers.

To keep the company independent, they have continued to raise funds from investors. The company raised an additional $20 million USD in funding for the software in January 2016.

On August 10 2017, Discord publicly announced the release of their long-awaited "Video Calling and Screenshare" functionality, but due to the unique nature of real time video transmissions, this was only released to 5% of the total member base who had registered before that date. Discord has cited they will expand this "open beta" to more users over the course of the month and that a "full release" is at least a "month or so" away.

Reception
By January 2016, Hammer & Chisel claimed that Discord had been used by 3 million people, with growth of 1 million per month, reaching 11 million users in July that year. As of December 2016, the company reports it had 25 million users worldwide. In May that year, one year after the software's release, Tom Marks, writing for PC Gamer, described Discord as the best VoIP service available. Lifehacker has praised Discord's interface, ease of use and platform compatibility.

Discord has had problems with hostile behaviour and abuse within chats, with some communities of chat servers being 'raided' by other communities. This includes flooding with controversial topics related to race, religion, politics and pornography.