The idea of Discord belongs to Jason Citron, the founder of OpenFeint, a mobile gaming platform, and Stanislav Vishnevsky, the founder of Guildwork, another social gaming platform. Citron sold OpenFeint to GREE in 2011 for $104 million, and in 2012 together with GREE founded the game development studio Hammer and Chisel.
His first product was Fates Forever, which came out in 2014 and was expected by Citron to become the first MOBA game. On the mobile platform, it did not achieve commercial success.
During the development process, he realized how difficult it was for his team to develop tactics in games such as Final Fantasy XIV and League of Legends that provide Voice over IP (VoIP) software, which led to the development of voice over IP services.
A chat focused on usability has the least impact on performance. For the development of Discord music, Hammer and Chisel received additional funding from YouWeb 9+ Incubator, which also funded the launch of Hammer and Chisel, as well as Benchmark Capital and Tencent. Discord was released publicly under the domain name discord app in May 2015.
Citron said that they did not take specific measures for the target audience, but some game-related subreddits soon began to replace their IRC links with Discord links. Discord is common among LAN and e-sports players.
The company benefits from its relationship with Twitch anchors and the Diablo and World of Warcraft subreddit communities. Discord raised another $20 million in funding in January 2016, including investment from WarnerMedia (then Time Warner).
Warner Media Investment Group sold its shares in 2019 when Microsoft announced in April 2018 that it would provide Discord support to Xbox Live users so that they can link their Discord and Xbox Live accounts so that they can connect to their Xbox Live friends list.
