In January 2016, Discord raised an additional $20 million in funding including an investment from WarnerMedia (then TimeWarner). The company benefited from relationships with Twitch streamers and subreddit communities for Diablo and World of Warcraft. Discord became widely used by esports and LAN tournament gamers. According to Citron, they made no specific moves to target any specific audience, but some gaming-related subreddits quickly began to switch their IRC links with Discord links. ĭiscord was publicly released in May 2015 under the domain name. To develop Discord, Hammer & Chisel gained additional funding from YouWeb's 9+ incubator, which had also funded the startup of Hammer & Chisel, and from Benchmark capital and Tencent. This led to the development of a chat service with a focus on user friendliness with minimal impact to performance. Īccording to Citron, during the development process, he noticed how difficult it was for his team to work out tactics in games like Final Fantasy XIV and League of Legends using available voice over IP (VoIP) software. Their first product was Fates Forever, released in 2014, which Citron anticipated to be the first MOBA game on mobile platforms, but it did not become commercially successful.
Citron sold OpenFeint to GREE in 2011 for US$104 million, which he used to found Hammer & Chisel, a game development studio, in 2012. The concept of Discord came from Jason Citron, who had founded OpenFeint, a social gaming platform for mobile games, and Stanislav Vishnevsky, who had founded Guildwork, another social gaming platform.