The game was called Fates Forever, a mobile MOBA, and in 2014 it did not sell. Jason Citron had a studio called Hammer & Chisel, a team, and a flop.
He had been through a version of this before. Born in San Francisco in 1984 and raised in South Florida, he got a computer from his grandfather and learned QBasic at 13 with a friend. His first program was a text-based role-playing game. He has called himself a Squaresoft fanboy.
Using a jailbroken development kit he built the game that became Aurora Feint, on the App Store the day it launched.
Here is the part few people know. In high school, in 1999, he started a company writing code for internet services. One weekend he earned $500 writing PHP for clients overseas. His parents worried he was mixed up in something improper, until he explained it was coding work. His first real paycheck had looked to the people who loved him like trouble.
He studied game design at Full Sail University, graduating in 2004, then worked as a gameplay programmer and a tools engineer at Double Fine Productions. He bought one of the first iPhones, decided within about six months it would suit mobile games, and when Apple announced the App Store he dropped a social-network idea. Using a jailbroken development kit he built the game that became Aurora Feint, on the App Store the day it launched. The social layer inside it became OpenFeint, started in 2009 and grown to 100 employees. GREE bought it in 2011 for about $104 million. He calls it his only significant financial success.
Then Fates Forever. While building it, his team hit a small irritation: the voice software they used to coordinate tactics was heavy and hard to set up. He and engineer Stanislav Vishnevskiy built a lighter chat service and called it Discord. It launched in May 2015. Gaming subreddits began swapping IRC links for Discord links. By December 2018 Greenoaks led $150 million at a $2 billion valuation.
Independence has cost. In 2021 Microsoft was reportedly in talks to buy Discord for over $10 billion; the talks ended, and a September round set the price near $15 billion. Extremist groups used its servers, including those tied to the 2017 Charlottesville rally and the 2022 Buffalo shooting. A French regulator fined it 800,000 euros in 2022. It cut 4% of staff in August 2023 and 17% in January 2024. In April 2025 Citron stepped aside as CEO, saying it was in anticipation of going public, and Bloomberg reported a confidential IPO filing in January 2026. No listing had been confirmed in November 2026.
The founder's lesson is plain. The game flopped. The tool the team built for itself to play it is the one that lasted.