Sony Partners With Discord In Huge Move For Cross-Platform Communication

Sony Interactive Entertainment has officially announced its partnership with Discord, the developer behind the massively successful, gaming-oriented chat app of the same name.

Discord was previously in talks with Microsoft for a potential buyout deal worth billions of dollars, but negotiations between the two companies ended with Discord retaining its independence. Discord executives said they were going to try to get funds via a public listing instead.

In lieu of this, Sony decided to invest in Discord and become partners with the company to integrate the chat app’s features with PlayStation Network. The integration between Discord and PSN is expected to begin in early 2022.

SIE president and CEO Jim Ryan said that their primary goal for this partnership was to enable their players to more easily connect with one another and boost the overall social and communication experience for PSN users.

“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,” Ryan stated.

Unlike Microsoft’s attempt at buying Discord entirely, Sony opted to make a minority investment instead. Ryan said that this decision was initially inspired by Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy, co-founders of Discord, and their dedication to helping gamers create their own communities.

As of now, it’s unclear what Sony’s exact plan is. Ryan’s official statement does not give any specific details as to what fruit this future integration will bear, but it seems to be more than just a port of the Discord app for PlayStation consoles.

Communication between console players has always been difficult outside of voice chat due to the natural lack of access to a keyboard, making communication via text incredibly tedious. With that being said, Sony and Discord’s goal of implementing a seamless communications network between consoles and mobile users can prove to be a huge stride in how players in these platforms talk to each other.

Sony will be sharing more about their plans with Discord in the coming months as the project makes more progress.