Discord signs partnership with Sony for PS5

FULL ANNOUNCEMENT HERE

Apparently while Microsoft were trying to buy Discord altogether, they were already in talks with Sony to sign a partnership bringing full Discord integration to the PS5. Currently details are scant but this is supposed to kick off sometime next year and I assume will work much like Spotify is integrated into consoles allowing you to play music in the background of games and controlling tracks through the Home menu. Kind of ironic that the big news was about Microsoft but turns out Sony struck a deal instead - a very different kind of deal but still for those that use Discord for in-game chat this is definitely one less hoop to jump through on consoles. Question remains if Discord will treat this as a timed exclusive type of deal and then enable the same sort of integration on Xbox consoles down the road or if this is a long term exclusivity deal.

With crossplay becoming more and more common, this is much more than just a nice little addition, it's almost a necessity. I'm just disappointed it's still close to a year away. With Destiny getting crossplay this year I've been trying to figure out an ideal voice chat solution, and I've determined I'm probably going to have to do something dumb like using the PSN voice chat on my phone if I want to play on PC, which I do. Discord being available on Playstation will be the ideal solution, shame it's not coming sooner.

That announcement tells me next to nothing about what this actually entails. While I'm sure that's the intent, I have trouble imagining it will be much more than what the Xbox already has, wherein you can link your Xbox Live account to Discord to have the app recognize your accounts and what games you play, especially since the wording on "service will integrate with your social experience" feels very particularly worded to not say "service will come to PlayStation".

I can't help but feel this is more Sony Pictures wanting to shut down movie stream nights.

@ry_ry: The deal is with SIE though, specifically between PlayStation and Discord, not Sony the parent company. Even if that were their end goal, not much they can do about it unless they want to make a system to actively monitor video calls for potential video streaming, which I'm sure Discord users would (not) love.

@franzlska: We can only guess at this point but I'm guessing by fully integrated they mean like it's going to be tied in on the XMB level and not just surface level social status pulls. So just like you can have Spotify running in the background and you can control volume levels of Spotify music vs in-game sounds, you will probably have a whole different "widget" view for Discord when you bring up the PS menu. I don't own a PS5 yet so I've never used the new UI but I assume when you hit the PS button you still get the various options for changing volume, shutting the console down etc.

@franzlska: If that were the case then why would it be launching next year? There are close to 8 months left in 2021, and that kind of functionality can't take more than a couple months to implement.

Plus when you announce something that far out and build anticipation and then provide almost nothing you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot. Better to announce closer to implementation and have people go "oh that's neat" than to build up 8 months of anticipation only to deliver a wet fart.

It's possible that the timing is influenced by other factors (like an exclusivity deal with Microsoft that's expiring) but my guess is that they're going to provide some kind of app integration. It's probably a good thing for Sony because it will move some of their voice chat off their own servers, saving bandwidth, and also save moderation costs.

Discord integration would be good. The more stuff that's platform agnostic the better.

The second paragraph definitely makes it seem like the actual discord functionality (text and voice chat) will be included in the PS version of the app.

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.

Saying it will allow people to hang out and communicate more easily definitely makes it seem like it will be more than just surfacing your active game to your discord friends.

@ll_exile_ll: As I said above I think that there will probably be some kind of app integration, but the text you cited is absolute corporate buzzspeak with no meaning whatsoever. Big "We're going to synergize the vertical integration of our platforms" energy.

You absolutely could claim that linking your Discord and PSN accounts allows people to "hang out, have fun, and communicate more easily while playing games together."

@bigsocrates: Fair point about the timing bit. I don't assume it's going to be something less than bringing Discord to PS out of a desire to not have Discord on PS or anything, obviously the more platforms Discord is on the better both Discord and those platforms become. Something about the announcement's lack of details still leaves me a bit uncertain, though I suppose that may just be a bit of cynicism.

Good for Discord and Sony.

IIRC, Discord is about to go public and the more platforms that have access to Discord the better.

Microsoft has a bad history of buying up smaller tech companies, absorbing / gutting them, then releasing inferior versions of the same product / tech under the Microsoft banner.

Discord deserves better than that.