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?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
slaapliedje Apr 3, 2021
Quoting: Cyba.CowboyIRC will always be around! Though it doesn't exactly have voice / video.Quoting: PhiladelphusQuoting: slaapliedjeHere's something I find hilarious about this... everyone uses Discord for gaming voice chat...I'm not sure this is actually correct, or at least, entirely correct. I mean, sure, lots of people do use Discord for gaming voice chat, don't get me wrong, but it's also much more than that: it's basically a place for lots of communities to hang out and asynchronously communicate.
Quoting: PhiladelphusQuoting: slaapliedjeHere's something I find hilarious about this... everyone uses Discord for gaming voice chat...If Discord were just voice chat then yes, it'd be relatively simple to replace with any of the other alternatives out there (other than the whole "network effect" and getting everyone to settle on an alternative), but it's really a lot more than that for some people and I don't know, off the top of my head, of a replacement that exactly covers all its use cases. That's the real issue for people looking for alternatives.
Well that's the thing - those of us that have been around (online) for a while will remember the days of ICQ / AIM / IRC / MSN Chat / Yahoo! Chat / whatever, when everyone used such services heavily... Then almost overnight, they died (largely the big companies got all worried about their legal liabilities, due to idiots hitting-up kids in chat).
Granted some of these services are still around, but they're ghost towns and the few users they still have are almost always bots, scammers or people who simply refuse to give in to changing trends. The same can be said of the "alternatives" to these early chat services, that have popped-up over the years.
I always thought that closing all these chat services en-masse was a dumb idea and I think a great big void was left... In my opinion, Discord has gone some way to filling that void for many people.
Cyba.Cowboy Apr 3, 2021
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...
Philadelphus Apr 4, 2021
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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