Found this from middle of last year related to personalizing Teams and trying to get broader reach. I don’t know how far they rolled it out to the public or what additional changes are still slated but not yet released. They want it to be used by everyone for anything and everything.
Discord is a funny way to spell Sega.
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ROFL 
It’s not that they wanted to, they just didn’t want to lose out on the potential. Fortunately for Microsoft and ever stock holder, they did not get the winning bid. No need to be dragged into that dumpster fire.
It looks like Oracle/Walmart forced acquisition is on hold anyways.
MS is a perfect fit for Tiktok.
Oracle and Walmart trying to buy Tiktok is as ridiculous as MS trying to buyout Versace and Gucci.
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Again they arent going to spend 10 million on Discord just to make chat and messages on xbox be better. A lot can be leveraged into teams and their business sector.
Borrowing some of the technology stack to improve teams sure, maybe.
Discord itself will become a gateway to xbox services. MS considers gaming a core pillar of it’s business. A ten billion dollar acquisition by a two trillion dollar company for one of it’s core pillars is nothing. What you are proposing is old Microsoft thinking.
(Assuming any of this happens at all. Which is a big assumption)
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If Microsoft acquires Discord that would be huge. Would be a great entrance into PC gaming, game streaming and their cloud gaming ambitions.
Imagine being able to join someones game on your phone or PC by just clicking on their name in Discord. Imagine mixing Discord and Xbox Game Pass for PC. Would make Nitro more interesting.
Meanwhile, besides gaming, Discord has become the primary place to build communities. And that goes a lot further than gaming alone. This would be the consumer product Microsoft is clearly looking for, also looking at the TikTok acquisition stuff.
I can see the business case for this.
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Things didn’t pan out too well for Microsoft and their $8.5B on Skype. Perhaps Discord communities may make migration less likely, but they might also easily evaporate if something better comes along. MS would imo be better off developing their own solution that ties into gamepass, and save the +$10B for acquisitions that bring more exclusives to xbox/pc.
While I see the the concern, Microsoft has enough cash that both are feasible. Also, skype staying functionally stationary wasn’t the fault of MS, nor did they do anything to harm the model.
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Arguably even Mixer brought technologies to MS that it leveraged in Teams as far as I recall. With Skype they were just too late to follow the trends I think.
Yeah, Jez even made a tweet around people thinking that MS ruined Skype :
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I can’t help but laugh at all the “use the money for something else” takes. Like there is some arbitrary limit on purchases they are willing to make. If they want it, see it as something that will make them money in the future, and the target is willing to sell, they will buy it.
Are they going to spend every cent of cash they have, no. But spending 10B on discord wont suddenly make them say “ah, too bad, we spent 10B on Discord, now we cant buy Sega for 6B”
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I mean more critically as though investing money to buy discord. a play that goes clearly way beyond Xbox and gaming impacts purely on their ability to sign more studios. It’s a bit crazy how so many literally can’t understand how a business operates and view the world entirely through the lens of online console wars. Scrub crazy. Scary.
Microsoft has a lot of money but +$10B is still a decent sum for them. It could be spent well elsewhere and they have other divisions that may also want to burn some cash. I could well be wrong about Discord’s future but it at least seems like there’s some risk here. I think it would be safer to buy more developers/publishers, at least if gamepass is the goal. I don’t know the details well enough to say where things went wrong with Skype, but many people left for greener pastures and one could just worry the same might happen to Discord at some point.
LOL.
Right, the company that was going to spend 50 Billion on Pinterest cant invest in studios if they spend 10 on discord. MS carries ~140 billion in cash. With interest rates where they are investors generally going to want to know why cash is sitting not being invested on something that will net a return.
I don’t know where this bizarre console wars strawman you are peddling came from, but its pure nonsense.
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I don’t really see where console warring comes into this, and I don’t think buying Discord would necessarily a bad deal. But Microsoft’s resources as grand as they may be are finite. And buying Discord isn’t without risk. If it’s to support gamepass, then exclusives just seem like a better way to bring people over to xbox/pc gamepass. If they’re able to do that, then they can roll out something that all those gamers might like more than discord, and it would cost them a lot less than $10B to develop.
Gaming is not limited to games only. Gaming is media and community. MS is not the third party publisher to be concerned only about the games and be content with that.