Prior to creating Discord, CEO Jason Citron was also behind OpenFeint, an early precusor to the Apple Game Center and Google Play Games. The service was centered around sharing scores and achievements, and quickly attracted attention due to how easy it was to implement in apps.
The first company to invest in OpenFeint was The9, a Chinese operator known for introducing World of Warcraft to Asian territories. However, there are better known today as NetEase.
OpenFeint would be bought out by Japanese company GREE, Inc. in April 2011 due to the similarity of its own social media platform. This was three months after GREE had both established presence in the United States and partnered Tencent. Not even two months later, a class action lawsuit had begun accusing OpenFeint of selling people's date en masse to advertisers.
https://www.courthousenews.com/gamers-say-openfeint-sold-them-out/Discord and lack of privacy go hand-in-hand at this point, but it's important to understand that this was not some forcing of their hand; Jason Citron deliberately created social networks with the foreknowledge that they'd only profit off personal information.
When looking at other "gamer" centric services from Opera GX to Steam to the modern prevalence of microtransactions and gacha, it becomes apparent that all of this has its roots in OpenFeint.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKe4nWe6aaYSome people claim the world ended in 2012 because of Nostadamus or shifts in the planet's fault line. Others think it's just that too many people are on social media. In actuality, there was a concerted effort by corporations the average person has never heard of to insert themselves into our lives, often through the most innocuous ways.
Do YOU remember OpenFeint, anon?
