PlayStation Discord integrations are starting to roll out

The first fruits of PlayStation’s investment in Discord are starting to be plucked, with a new integration between the messaging and VOIP platform and PlayStation Network. Discord are starting to roll out the ability to link your PSN account with Discord and display your game activity on both PS4 and PS5 in your user profile.

Gradually rolling out around the world, starting with the US, this is a relatively standard integration that matches what is already possible with other platforms, including Steam, Epic Games and Xbox. Once your accounts have been linked together, your PSN ID will be visible within your Discord profile, helping PlayStation friends find one another and be sure that they’ve found the right person. Additionally, Discord will display the game that you’re currently playing on PS4 or PS5 for others to see.

Linking is a simple case of signing into your PSN ID via the Discord app, where you can then select what is shared. Read more about how to do it on the Discord guide.

Presumably this is just the very first step, considering that Sony invested heavily within Discord in May 2021 and potentially staved off a buyout by Microsoft (who were rumoured to be lining up a $10 billion acquisition offer). At the time, PlayStation boss Jim Ryan said:

Together, our teams are already hard at work connecting Discord with your social and gaming experience on PlayStation Network. 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.

Simply showing who you are and what game your playing within Discord is several steps short of what people imagined from the announcement. Sony made sweeping changes to how messaging and parties work made in the run up to the PlayStation 5 release. Where party chats were previously one-off meet ups, they are now more permanent fixtures in the system, in a fashion similar to the way that you can have persistent chats and servers with friends in Discord. Integrating Discord servers would also be an ample replacement for the recently disabled Communities feature on PS4. Even if a native Discord client with server support on PlayStation stays off the cards, it would still be very cool to be able to chat with Discord friends through your console, and without having to fuss with running the chat app on your phone and all the headset and audio set up complications that throws up.

Source: Discord