Today, Sony Interactive Entertainment announced a minority investment in Discord, a social chat/streaming app for gaming enthusiasts, as part of its Series H funding round.

Discord and Sony are currently working to more closely integrate Discord with the PlayStation Network on both PlayStation consoles and mobile devices, which could lead to significant (and potentially necessary) changes to the way Discord works on consoles.

Discord currently has little to no presence on consoles. This is despite the platform's great popularity as a place for people to form communities and voice chat together while playing games. Now that cross-platform multiplayer is more common than ever, platform holders like Microsoft and Sony have good reason to make quality cross-platform voice chat solutions available on their consoles.

The folks at Microsoft (recently rumored to be in talks to acquire Discord) have already added a level of Discord integration to the Xbox family of consoles. However, the functionality is limited to showing who in your Discord friends list is playing what on which Xbox console, and there is still no option to initiate a voice chat with someone who is using Discord on their Xbox.

So while it remains to be seen what the impact of Sony's investment in Discord will be, and how much the company has invested, it is clear that deeper Discord integration has been brought to PlayStation consoles. Whether this integration will extend to Xbox remains to be seen, and we hope to see results early in 2022.

"An excerpt from Sony's announcement reads, "Our team is already hard at work connecting Discord to social and gaming experiences on the PlayStation Network. Our goal is to bring the Discord and PlayStation experience closer together on console and mobile starting early next year, making it easier for friends, groups and communities to hang out, have fun and communicate while playing games together."