All eyes in the video game business world have been hovering over Discord for the last few months. In March 2025 Bloomberg reported that the company is working with JP Morgan Chase on an upcoming IPO that would list the company on the stock market. This followed statements by then-CEO Jason Citron saying the company would “probably go public” in late 2024. With hundreds of millions of registered users, the platform has become central for developers’ community management efforts—potentially making it a ripe opportunity for the investment world.
But Discord’s central presence has made many observers worry that business changes benefitting Wall Street could worsen the app for users. Many have invoked the Cory Doctorow-coined phrase “enshittification,” which refers to the degradation of online products and platforms to drive short-term revenue gains at the cost of the user experience. Can Discord manage an IPO without alienating its core users—and the developers who follow them?
Possibly. At the 2025 Game Developers Conference we were able to get a surprisingly frank assessment of Discord’s product strategy from chief technology officer Stan Vishnevskiy and senior vice president of product Peter Sellis, who were remarkably upbeat about its monetization strategy. The pair painted a picture that placed Discord Nitro at the center of its offerings—one that hopefully won’t need “enshittification” to benefit all parties.
Discord’s had plenty of swings and misses in the last half-decade
Though Discord has enjoyed explosive growth in the last decade (particularly during COVID-19-driven lockdowns that left players at home and in search of remote socialization), it hasn’t had a perfect track record. In 2021 the company tried to capitalize on its exploding userbase by creating “a digital third place” through “stages,” saying at the time that 80 percent of surveyed users across 2019-2020 said they use the app for non-video game purposes.
Then in 2024 the company retreated from that ambition, laying off 170 employees, and telling users it was narrowing its focus from being a “community-focused chat app” to one where people “deepen their relationships through games and other interest.” Translation: they couldn’t break out of the video game bubble.
Discord doesn’t want to call it a “retreat” of course. While quizzing Vishnevskiy and Sellis about what the company learned from its withdrawal from a difficult business strategy, a PR spokesperson interjected to say Discord views it as more of a “pivot.”
After an awkward pause, Sellis chimed in with one major takeaway from the era: Discord’s push to expand its userbase included investment in the Discord mobile app to better function on low-end devices. That effort proved successful in the long run as the company watched more of its video game-playing userbase adopt mobile as their primary platform of choice.
“When you’re able to do that, suddenly Discord gets better for gaming, planning the night with your friends, and then afterwards—sharing the emotions and things like that,” he added. “I think what what you’ll hear us talk about sometimes is that Discord is the best place to talk and hang out before, during, and after a game.”
A happier and more engaged mobile audience drove what Sellis and Vishnevskiy said was the core of Discord’s monetization strategy: Discord Nitro. The monthly subscription service—which offers users advanced server tools, customization options, and larger file uploads—is the center of the company’s plans to monetize its free-to-play app.
This was slightly surprising, as other chat apps and social platforms have preferred to prioritize advertising over subscription services. But the pair said all the other features the company has rolled out, like the Discord Shop, are downstream of Nitro subscriptions.
Sellis said there are three predictors for if Discord users will subscribe to Nitro: the time they spend in Discord, the time they spend in voice chat, and the number of their friends have Nitro subscriptions. And it turns out those with Nitro subscriptions are the ones spending money in the Discord shop.
“That’s a very strong indicator that we’re incentive-compatible with our users,” said Sellis. So if the shop isn’t meant to monetize free users, what is? That would be the quest system—an unusual form of advertising that an audience of players responds to better than the broader public.
How will Discord monetize if it goes public?
If we follow those threads to a possible future, Discord’s post-IPO revenue strategy will likely be based on a carrot-and-stick approach to get more users on Nitro. The carrot would be to beefing up Nitro’s offerings—possibly with incentives offered by game developers. The stick would be to eroding the features available to free Discord users and lock them behind a Nitro paywall (the aforementioned enshittification).
If Sellis’ theory holds up, then the company’s best path forward is to nudge users to spend more time in voice chat, and to connect them with users subscribed to Nitro. Discord sits at the center of the “online social” future—the phenomenon of players spending time in online games not to compete, but to casually socialize—and what direction it takes to drive revenue could shape the games that rely on it to host their communities.
Game Developer and Game Developers Conference are sibling organizations under Informa.
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