Jason Citron

Jason Citron is a video game developer and the founder and CEO of Discord.

Citron has shown an interest in computers and video games since he was a child. He has said that his obsession with mobile games came from playing his Nintendo DES when he was five. He taught himself to program computers at a young age. By the time he was thirteen, he had taught himself the programming language QBasic and designed a video game. He attended Full Sail University where he studied game design.

Citron has designed and released several video games. His first was a mobile puzzle game with role-playing elements called Aurora Feint in 2008, which he designed with Danielle Cassley. Aurora Feint was not very successful because its price was higher than most other games. The game did not earn enough money to keep the company behind it running, and Citron was forced to change his business model to keep it afloat. He decided to create a software development kit that would make it easy for other game developers to add social features to their games, like the connection of users' social media contacts for real-life friends to play together. However, he hadn't yet built any of the necessary technology and only had limited time to do so before the company went bankrupt.

To kickstart the development of his new idea, Citron created a landing page for the product, called OpenFeint, which pitched the idea without a product behind it. A story was run on TechCrunch explaining the technology, and 400 developers signed up nearly immediately. This enabled the software to be built, and after launching in March 2009, OpenFeint was successful. Two years after launching, OpenFeint was purchased by GREE for $100 million. Citron planned on staying with the company but was asked to resign due to disagreements with the new management. OpenFeint was shut down in 2012.

In 2012, Citron started Hammer & Chisel, a game developer. In 2014, the company released the mobile game Fates Forever, a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game. The game is played with online players grouped into trios and battling other trios in a medieval-themed world. Citron unveiled it at a TechCrunch Disrupt event in late 2013. It was ultimately unsuccessful and was shut down in 2015.

For his next venture, Citron decided to target the PC gaming market, rather than mobile gaming, though his focus was still on introducing a social aspect to a gaming application. This led to him creating Discord, which quickly gained popularity in the gaming community. It was different than other existing group chat platforms at the time, which were often software programs that users were required to install. Discord is browser-based and requires only one person to set up a server; that person can then share the link to others who can join the channel with one click. Citron developed Discord with Stan Vishnevskiy. Discord's given launch date is May 13, 2015, as it is the day that Citron and Vishnevskiy said strangers began using the platform.

Discord channels can be made public or private, and access can be shared with as many or as few users as the creator allows. The use of Discord quickly moved beyond the gaming community, and it is now a popular platform for all sorts of communication. A lot of this growth is attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic, which resulted in most of the world shifting to remote work and virtual communication methods for all purposes. A March 2019 survey from Statista Global Consumer Survey revealed that only 1 percent of those surveyed regularly used Discord; this rose to 8 percent in March 2020, when the World Health Organization first declared the pandemic.