If they treat it like GitHub and let it be it's own thing then maybe I'll stick around. I doubt they're going to treat it like that though because they don't treat gamers like they do devs.
Maybe now's a good time for somebody to start building an alternative.
I think there is also going to be higher public expectations of moderating and monitoring of what is discussed on Discord if Microsoft owns them. That may not be a headache that Microsoft even wants to deal with.
Mojang recently announced that all mojang.com accounts would be migrated to Microsoft accounts. https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/mojang-account-move
Continuing to silo it into the gaming niche when Slack was just bought for 3 times as much makes no sense.
Feature-wise they're 90% interchangeable.
Microsoft can slap a white theme on Discord and rename it to something stupid like "Agile Teams" and have a ready-made Slack alternative.
Server admins control users on slack on the other hand. Your server admin can deactivate your entire account, DMs are tied to a server and your server admin can read them. It's a business tool, the expectation is employers have access to your business communications. The same on discord would be a massive privacy violation. But now as a business, how do you ensure that users aren't sharing passwords in chat, that your departed employee doesnt have a ton of company secrets in their dms etc
You cannot leave a channel in Discord, and by default it will notify you of every message sent in every channel on the server. The best you can do is mute a channel and select 'Hide muted channels'.
Discord has far superior voice comms - in both quality and features (Voice Channels are great), and then there's the whole "roles" system.
In my experience in places where Slack was settled on as a corporate messaging solution the three questions asked (in order of importance) were
* "Does it support custom animated emoji"?
* "Does it have website and document previews"?
* "Can I send my notifications to it"?
Their UX and APIs are incredibly different and their server management and moderation tools aren't even comparable between them.
The 90% interchangeable is only in feature checkboxes for the client application.
I have a small server, and I can't see the point of paying for Nitro just to have animated custom emojis. Not worth the $10/month to me.
If you get value from Discord, would be sad to see it go out of business, and have steady income, consider subscribing at that tier.
$5 feels right to me for cross-server emoji, control over your user hash, and the animated avatar. I never really bought into the server boost thing, myself.
For Microsoft, however, it holds incredible strategic importance to their Xbox division. If suddenly the #1 gaming voice and text chat on PC is fully cross-compatible with Xbox and Xbox services it puts Sony at a huge ecosystem disadvantage. When added to the context of Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda and their shift in strategy to Xbox as a service it makes perfect sense.