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What Discord’s potential IPO means for its business and the video game industry

Written by admin on January 16, 2026

Last week, Bloomberg reported that Discord has filed confidentially for an initial public offering. With more than 200 million monthly users globally, Discord is among the few major social media platforms to remain private.

Now, it could be about to push ahead with the largest IPO in the video game industry since 2021, when Roblox Corp. and several other companies went public, according to PitchBook senior research analyst Eric Bellomo, speaking to Game Developer. It means Discord, used by both industry professionals and consumers, is at a juncture that will certainly have an impact on the platform itself and the wider industry.

Bloomberg reported that Discord is working with Goldman Sachs Group and JP Morgan Chase on the listing. Discussions are ongoing, and the company could still decide to hit the brakes. Discord told Bloomberg that it remains focused on “delivering the best possible experience for users and building a strong sustainable business.”

Talk about a potential IPO has been ongoing for some time, and continued when Discord co-founder and former CEO Jason Citron stepped down in April 2025 and named former Activision Blizzard vice chairman Humam Sakhhini as his successor. Just a month prior, the New York Times reported the company was in talks with bankers about an IPO.

“Humam and I are fundamentally aligned that creating long-term value requires long-term thinking and focusing on an amazing user experience,” Citron said in a public letter to staff when announcing his exit as chief exec.

Discord was born out of a failed mobile game studio by Citron and Stanislav Vishnevisky. Though the game didn’t take off, its internal messaging tools worked, and the company pivoted from the Hammer & Chisel studio into Discord. It succeeded—and quickly—as a chat platform for gamers and has continued to grow; the company made a reported $890 million in revenue in 2024, almost double what it earned in 2022. Investors valued the company at $15 billion after a $500 million funding round in 2021.

The sheer amount of financing pumped into Discord over the years means it’s not necessarily surprising that Discord would seek to go public. Investors, at some point, want to make a return on their investment. An acquisition, like the $12 billion bid Discord rejected from Microsoft in 2021, is one way to achieve that goal. An IPO is another. Discord will still have institutional investors, Bellomo said, but an IPO widens who can buy shares in a company.

“It brings liquidity,” Bellomo said, “It’s also a way to finance future operations without navigating these kinds of opaque and sometimes slow private markets.”

Discord, as a private company, focuses primarily on growing its user base as a free-to-use platform. “When they stay private, they can test different ways to monetize their user base,” Bellomo said. “They are primarily a freemium service right now, but there’s a lot more latitude to experiment, to fail in some cases, and keep growing. As a public company, that balance shifts.”

“It’s a key validation that gaming can still be a venture scale ecosystem and still attract venture dollars and continue to grow”

Discord, as a public company, has to publicly report to shareholders who demand growth—both in the user base and how Discord is able to monetize its service. Discord, as it stands, is a perfectly fine product to use at its free tiers. Its Nitro subscription makes that basic service better, in some ways, like allowing better streaming quality, custom emojis, and the ability to upload larger files. Discord’s main Nitro subscription is $10 a month, and its Basic tier is $2.99 a month.

The sort of further monetization expected of a public company could look like “the introduction of an advertising service, higher prices, more tiers, additional services to businesses, so B2B offerings in the form of ecommerce infrastructure or game publishing services.”

“The primary distinction is, as a consumer product in the private markets, you can really focus on growth and experimentation,” Bellomo said. “On the monetization front, as a public company, you need to both grow and monetize more and more each quarter.”

Despite being a multi-billion company, Discord has had this reputation as a platform for gamers; it’s dialed into the culture it has cultivated as a company. Discord has a lot in common with a chat platform like Slack, but the target audience is clearly different. It’s the gamer’s platform, and there is already concern regarding what some call the “enshittification” of companies that go public and become fixated on delivering value to shareholders.

A key challenge for Discord will be in maintaining that image as “a third digital space, and one that is very welcoming of tech-forward users and its user base culture,” Bellomo said. “Its credibility attracts new users to the platform, and it will need to do so while also monetizing those users more in the future.”

Beyond the direct impact on Discord as a platform and the business around it, the potential IPO has wider implications for the video game industry. Bellomo said the massive IPO validates the video game industry for investors in a period where there has been “a pretty precipitous decline in the number of investors who are actively writing checks to gaming startups.”

“It’s a key validation that gaming can still be a venture scale ecosystem and still attract venture dollars and continue to grow,” Bellomo said, while noting that the industry’s trajectory goes well beyond what happens with the Discord IPO.

The second big impact an IPO of Discord’s size has on the industry is in transparency, Bellomo said. The fact a public company needs to make its financials available to existing and prospective investors will be an asset for those looking to conduct an industry health check, which often includes keen-eyed reporters.

Another undercurrent behind Discord’s potential IPO is the scrutiny the company has faced over its approach to child safety. Like Roblox, Discord has been sued for allegedly facilitating the exploitation of children. Discord rolled out new safety and moderation tools in November following the filing of several lawsuits, including one from New Jersey attorney general Matthew J. Platkin. In September, Sakhnini was asked to appear at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to testify regarding the platform’s role in “the radicalization of online forum users,” citing the killing of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk.

That hearing does not appear to have been scheduled at the time of writing.