Do you use Discord? Well if these reports are to be trusted, it looks like they might get a new owner under Microsoft.
In an article on Bloomberg which cites anonymous sources "familiar with the matter", Microsoft are apparently in talks to buy Discord for more than $10 billion USD. This follows from another article from VentureBeat that claims Discord has been exploring options for a sale and has "signed an exclusive acquisition discussion with one party". Earlier this month the WSJ talked about how Discord revenue has increased quite a lot to $130 million in 2020 (up from $45 million in 2019) but it's not actually profitable yet.
For the Linux support of Discord, if Microsoft did acquire it we don't expect much to change. Discord's Linux client is full of issues that never get solved so Microsoft can't do much worse - we could even see an improvement perhaps. Nowadays Microsoft aren't exactly the same when it comes to Linux with the likes of Teams, Visual Studio Code and Edge all on Linux in some form. Microsoft are also the owners of GitHub which huge parts of the open source community entirely rely on.
Still, with all the acquisitions Microsoft has done, that's a lot to have under a single roof. This continued consolidation across the gaming industry is pretty concerning. Some companies really do end up with far too much influence and power.
How do you feel about this?
Quoting: slaapliedjeIRC will always be around! Though it doesn't exactly have voice / video.
Yeah, but like the few "old" chat / IM services still around, it's a pretty niche thing these days...
Quoting: slaapliedjeYeah, what I meant wasn't that Discord was only used for gaming voice chat, but that instead of using in-game voice chat, or steam voice chat, they use Discord's voice chat. For sure, I'm in a few communities around things, one of which is the Atari VCS Founders group, and never once used the voice chat features for any of them. We use Discord for the voice chat though for our Valheim server.Ahh, fair enough. My misunderstanding.
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