PlayStation is partnering with Discord to bring even more ways to connect your PSN account with friends and other players. The partnership is expected to see fruits in early 2022, connecting your PlayStation Network experience on console and mobile with your Discord account. As part of the PlayStation Discord partnership, Sony has made a minority investment into Discord.
“From our very first conversation with co-founders Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy, I was inspired by their lifelong love for gaming and our teams’ shared passion to help bring friends and communities together in new ways,” said PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan. “Empowering players to create communities and enjoy shared gaming experiences is at the heart of what we do, so we are beyond excited to start this journey with one of the world’s most popular communication services.”
Discord is a popular communication and community platform used for an assortment of purposes, and tends to be a central communication hub for people playing PC games together. Its coming integration with the PSN is expected to be a huge boost in communication and community capabilities, as well as a great opportunity for Sony to better embrace cross-platform play on PlayStation consoles.
The PlayStation Discord partnership also explains why Sony did away with its own Communities feature, seemingly to pave the way for the integration of Discord and its community and communication tools.
“Together, our teams are already hard at work connecting Discord with your social and gaming experience on PlayStation Network,” Ryan said as part of the blog post announce the partnership. “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.”
Outside of specifying that the connection is coming to both console and mobile, the post doesn’t get into any details of what features to expect from this integration, or if it will be replacing existing messaging and group capabilities on the PlayStation Network. Sony had previously said they were looking into options around the widely disliked change to PSN parties that came in an update late last year. It could be that Sony was simply biding its time for the this upcoming partnership with Discord, which may introduce a pretty enormous overhaul to how players interact with one another on PlayStation consoles and beyond.
This is part of a pattern of Sony investing in and partnering with companies. The console manufacturer also announced an investment and partnership with Epic Games last year, which continued with an additional investment this year.
[Source: SIE Blog]
