Discord made its way to PlayStation 5.
Discord made its way to PlayStation 5.
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Discord CEO sheds light on future of gamer communication as users cross 200M

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 10 min

Discord CEO Jason Citron cofounded his communications platform company after a failure. He had a big success with OpenFeint, a social gaming platform for mobile games, selling that to Gree for $104 million in 2011.

In 2012, Citron cofounded Hammer & Chisel, a studio aimed at making multiplayer online battle arena games. Its first title, Fates Forever, wasn’t able to compete with market leaders League of Legends and DOTA 2. So Citron pivoted to Discord and gamer communications in 2015. They built Discord because they wanted a better way to hang out before, during, and after playing games. The explosion of multiplayer games has led to Discord being an indispensable tool for players — as I have discovered in games like Call of Duty: Warzone where it’s much easier to talk to three players at once on Discord.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.