Considering the "pay for status and get everything else for free" strategy, it's understandable why Discord was promoting itself as a gamer-only platform for so

Considering the "pay for status and get everything else for free" strategy, it's understandable why Discord was promoting itself as a gamer-only platform for so long. In a professional or educational setting, custom emojis and cool-looking animations aren't that important. You just want a tool that does the job and does it well. If it does it for free, even better. If you look at it from that perspective, companies and educational institutions were a problem for Discord. They were using the service same as everyone else, while not bringing much revenue. This was especially true for school groups, which consisted mostly of kids that didn't have credit cards. The marketing move to appeal only to gamers, making the service unattractive for others, may have been deliberate after all. Nowadays, Discord has enough features to justify paying for, even if you don't care about status, so the strategy has changed.