According to the anonymous “people familiar with the matter” who spoke to Bloomberg, Microsoft is in the late stages of the $ 10 billion acquisition talks with Discord, a game-oriented community chat platform.
According to Bloomberg’s sources, Epic Games and Amazon were also involved in acquisition talks in the past. VentureBeat also reported this week that Discord is investigating ‘multi-party’ put options.
Launched in 2015 with Discord, individual users can create public or private servers that allow members to chat with others on that server via live streaming of text, images, voice and video. The service reportedly has 6.7 million such servers, which serve as centralized communication hubs for everything, from official news and discussion of game publishers and multiplayer organizations among small groups of friends to a chaotic gathering place for people who bet on the stock market and everything in between.
Discord reportedly has more than 140 million users per month and 300 million registered accounts. In December, the company raised $ 140 million at an implied valuation of $ 7 billion, according to TechCrunch, which more than doubled its valuation in less than a year.
The Wall Street Journal estimates that the company raised $ 130 million in 2020, mainly from the sale of a $ 100-a-year premium service called Nitro. Back in 2018, Discord also started offering direct game sales via the platform, which outperformed competitors such as Steam and the Epic Games Store by offering developers a 90 percent revenue. In 2019, the company closed a separate offering that gave Nitro subscribers free access to about 100 games, citing low usage.
Microsoft has been less than a year away from shutting down Mixer, its highly-promoted, game-oriented live streaming platform, which includes a $ 20 million exclusivity agreement with Tyler “Ninja” Blevins. Last year, Microsoft was apparently also in talks to acquire the social video network TikTok, when it appeared that the Chinese service was being forced to sell its US arm to a US company.
Microsoft also owns Skype, which many gamers used for complementary communication within game groups before Discord became the standard. And the technological conglomerate comes from the finalization of the $ 7.5 billion Bethesda acquisition, which will include a series of exclusive games for Microsoft platforms.