If Discord becomes a critical component to the content creators of the whole gaming ecosystem, there's going to be plenty of revenue opportunities.
Discord promises it will always be free with "no gotchas". It specifically notes no "slot limitations" as an example of that, which indicates premium tiers are unlikely. They promise to never charge for core functionality. Presumably they may be able to do some sponsored promotion of some sort, but banner ads are probably out.
The revenue plan they mention is here: "In the future there will be optional cosmetics like themes, sticker packs, and sound packs available for purchase." And I have not ever seen an emoji pack for a chat service as an appealing sales item that's going to fund a startup. I'm super skeptical of this, and it's why I don't use it.
But, it'd make a solid acquisition for a company like Twitch that has a shoddy/simple chat function and needs something better in the gaming space.
If Discord can keep up the growth, things like stickers, emojis, and sound packs could pull in good revenue. Also, the gaming community is already used to paying for these items on sites like Twitch
Everyone likes to keep coming up with new names for the word "emote".
But I have a "global twitch emote" plugin on chrome so I presume kappa will already show up for me if used in discord?
Granted, a lot of people will run the electron-based desktop app (which packages the web site), but IIRC, there's a plugin for twitch emotes for it too.
You underestimate gamers as a market. Valve's built a thriving business on virtual hats. Twitch sells access to premium emotes and a wider range of username colors as a subscription upgrade. "Cosmetic purchases" are huge.
Discord could also do what Twitch does and let streamers offer recurring donation options to their fanbases, in exchange for perks like being able to talk during restricted times (eg. during large streams) and custom community-specific stickers.
My thinking is that hats aren't that profitable without these kinds of tricks, and Steam effectively sponsored everything that happened at Valve before they implemented "gambling".
And if you refer to crates of random items as gambling, they've also filled in that gap with the Steam Marketplace where you can buy individual items for market-dictated prices from other Steam users, where Valve takes a portion of the money the items are sold for.
This business is extremely profitable. Looking at their game Dota 2 for example where they recently hosted the world's largest e-sports tournament, where the pricepool were completely funded by the players of Dota 2 through in-game virtual items. This pricepool were over $20,000,000 USD, funded through in-game purchases where 25% of the items price would go to the pricepool, and the rest would go to Valve. That is $60,000,000 USD that Valve profited in the span of two months, for one of their games, in one of their tournaments. Valve hosts 4 tournaments per year for this game.
Looking at the pricepool of their previous tournaments ( http://www.esportsearnings.com/tournaments ), we can see that this amount just keeps increasing year after year.
# Crates
Crates or doubling, tripling, etc. item's cost. Say I want a certain hat, on average, I'll need to pay multiple times (crate contains 5 other items, but successive crates do not yield duplicates in most recent Dota 2 versions, so worst case you pay 6 times a price).
# Steam Marketplace
Adds at least 30% to item's cost, since you buy with real-world dollars, but sell for "Valve Dollars" (only usable in Steam, no withdrawals), this is effectively paying more for a single item (at least 30% more expensive which is Valve's margin for Steam purchases of non-Valve titles).
In addition, Valve makes purchases non-tradable via Marketplace for a period of time (multiple months, usually) since original purchases for "preventing fraud". I see it as "incentivising gambling with crates", though.
# Third-party site
These were probably shut down because they involved real money, so Vavle could be potentially helping organise casino/bookmaking businesses from legal standpoint. It's all fine with Steam Money from marketplace.
So, yes, it is extremely profitable, probably orders of magnitude more profitable than "honest" selling where transaction is "pay money, receive item".
# Regarding TI
It is incredible how much money it made. It is as incredible as how Valve decided to split matchmaking pool for months with International Ranked to boost prize pool, so you had to pay $10 to go into faster queue.
In the beginning of Dota 2, you were able to buy item directly, now you either need to go to Commumity Market, or buy crates from Valve. Check out dota2.com/store — there is either half a year old sets, or crates for new ones. Even older items are not in the shop and I believe w/ever you unlock from crates is not tradable for quite some time.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there seems to be no way to buy particular items directly, at least not newer ones. (Exceptions are $30+ arcana quality sets which bring a lot of money as they are, so no need to increase price with "gambling".)
Amazon is another company with opportunities to make profit, but they traditionally haven't done much of that, eschewing that for just growing value.
In the years when Amazon was not turning profit, would you consider it a non-functional business?