Today Sony Interactive Entertainment announced a minority investment in Discord, the social chat/streaming app aimed at game enthusiasts, as part of the latter company's Series H funding round.
Discord and Sony are now working to more closely integrate PlayStation Network with Discord across both PlayStation consoles and mobile devices, which could herald a big (and necessary) change to the way Discord works on consoles.
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Discord hardly exists on game consoles at all currently. This is despite the platform's huge popularity as a place for people to form communities and voice chat together while playing games. And now that cross-platform multiplayer is more common than ever, platform holders like Microsoft and Sony have good reason to ensure there's a quality cross-platform voice chat solution available on its consoles.
The folks at Microsoft (who were recently rumored to be in talks to acquire Discord) have already added a level of Discord integration to the Xbox family of consoles. But functionality is limited to showing you who on your Discord friends list is playing what on which Xbox console — there's as of yet no option for initiating voice chat with someone using Discord on Xbox.
So while we don't yet know what impact Sony's investment in Discord will have, or how much the company invested, we do know that deeper Discord integration is now inbound to PlayStation consoles. Whether that integration will extend to Xbox remains to be seen. Expect to see the results sometime early in 2022.
"Together, our teams are already hard at work connecting Discord with your social and gaming experience on PlayStation Network," reads an excerpt of Sony's announcement. "Our goal is to bring the Discord and PlayStation experiences closer together on console and mobile starting early next year, allowing friends, groups, and communities to hang out, have fun, and communicate more easily while playing games together."
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