Microsoft is in exclusive talks to buy Discord, but it’s PS5 owners who would benefit the most if Sony splashed the cash.
Microsoft is in exclusive talks to buy Discord for the princely sum of $10 billion dollars. That’s a cool $2.5 billion more than it recently paid to acquire ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda. However, I can’t help but think that it’s Sony that should be trying to purchase Discord, not Microsoft. While it’s unlikely to have the capital at hand that Microsoft can muster, buying Discord would help Sony address one of the most disappointing aspects of the PS5: its lackluster voice chat. Objectively speaking, voice chat on PS5 doesn’t compare too favorably with Xbox. You can argue until you’re blue in the face that it’s “just as good” but you’d be wrong. Anyone who regularly switches between the two platforms can attest that PlayStation’s offering isn’t up to snuff when compared with Microsoft’s implementation. But there’s a good reason why. It’s easy to forget that Microsoft first brought voice chat to the original Xbox way back in 2002. It then took voice chat one step further by introducing Party Chat (or cross-game chat) during the Xbox 360 era in 2008 and has continued to tweak it since (you can now adjust the individual audio level of each party member now, for example). Microsoft has since invested heavily into its online services, something which was helped by users paying to play online. It’s had time and the resources, then, to hone its offering. Sony, meanwhile, took a different approach to online chat. Online was free on PS3, but Party Chat never materialized on Sony’s platform due to restrictions with the console’s memory. PlayStation fans had to wait until the PS4 for Party Chat to finally make an appearance on console, which coincided with the company making PlayStation Plus mandatory for online play. While this was certainly a much-needed addition to PlayStation’s online suite of services, Microsoft went one step further to improve voice chat in a big way on Xbox One.
