How discord, born from an obscure game, became a social hub for young people

December 31, 2021 iGaming & Gambling Industry Updates

Stanislav Vishnevskiy, left, and Jason Citron, co-founders of Discord, at the social hub’s offices in San Francisco, Dec. 20, 2021. Six years after Citron stripped his unsuccessful online game down to just its chat feature and named it Discord, it has exploded in popularity with young people who socialize on it through text and audio and video calls in groups known as servers.

In 2015, Jason Citron, a computer programmer, was struggling to break through in the video game industry. The new multiplayer game he had created with his development studio, Hammer & Chisel, was not catching on.

So Citron engineered an abrupt about-face. He laid off his company’s game developers, turned the game’s chatting feature into its sole product and gave it a mysterious name — Discord.

“I think at the time we had maybe six users,” Citron said. “It wasn’t clear that it was going to work.”

At first, Discord was only popular with other gamers. But more than six years later, driven in part by the pandemic, it has exploded into the mainstream. While adults working from home flocked to Zoom, their children were downloading Discord to socialize with other young people through text and audio and video calls in groups known as servers.