The concept of Discord came from Jason Citron, who had founded OpenFeint, a social gaming platform for mobile games. He sold OpenFeint to GREE in 2011 for US$104 million, which he used to found Hammer & Chisel, a game development studio, in 2012. 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. According 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. This led developers to develop a chat service with a focus on user friendliness with minimal impact to performance. 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. Discord was publicly released in May 2015 under the domain name discordapp.com. According to Citron, they made no specific moves to target any specific audience, but subreddits were replacing their IRC links with Discord links. Discord became widely used by esports and LAN tournament gamers. The company benefited from relationships with Twitch streamers and subreddit communities for Diablo and World of Warcraft. In January 2016, Discord raised an additional US$20 million in funding including an investment from WarnerMedia. In 2019, WarnerMedia Investment Group sold its share as it was shut down following AT&T’s acquisition of WarnerMedia. Microsoft announced in April 2018 that it will provide Discord support for Xbox Live users, allowing them to link their Discord and Xbox Live accounts so that they can connect with their Xbox Live friends list through Discord. In December 2018 the company announced it raised $150 million in funding at a $2 billion valuation. The round was led by Greenoaks Capital with participation from Firstmark, Tencent, IVP, Index Ventures and Technology Opportunity Partners. In March 2020, Discord changed its motto from “Chat for Gamers” to “Chat for Communities and Friends”. This was part of their response to an increase of users as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, which also included the introduction of server templates. In April 2020, Discord’s Twitter username was changed from @discordapp to @discord. Later in May 2020, Discord changed its primary domain from discordapp.com to discord.com. Starting in June 2020, Discord announced it was shifting focus away from video gaming specificity to a more all-purpose communication and chat client for all functions, revealing its new slogan “Your place to talk” and a revised website. Among other planned changes would be to reduce the number of gaming in-jokes it uses within the client, improving the user onboarding experience, and increasing server capacity and reliability. The company announced it had received an additional US$100 million in investments to help with these changes.