In a bid to better compete with Discord and bring users back to Steam for their discussions, Valve rolls out a ‘richer chat experience’ which includes a new friends list, multimedia features, group chats, and clear, crisp, encrypted voice chat.
As all the social networks know, keeping users within a network for as long as possible increases the revenue generated. The same is true of Steam. Valve wants you to visit and buy games, but then to hang around and use its community features because, chances are, it will probably lead to more game purchases. The problem is, Discord is drawing Steam users away, but Valve is attempting to fix that this week with an all-new Steam Chat experience.
As The Verge reports, this new Steam Chat has been created to compete with the Discord chat app which is proving extremely popular with gamers. A beta of Steam Chat launched for the Steam client in June, but this week the new chat experience is live for everyone both in the Steam client and for web browsers.
It’s meant to offer a much-improved and richer chat experience. Valve achieved this by allowing you to do a lot more in chat. The friends list lets you save favorites, group friends by game or party, and then easily start a group chat. It’s also possible for extra detail to be shown next to a friend’s name on a per game basis. For example, what game a particular friend is playing, what state they are in within the game, and what they are available for, e.g. matchmaking.
As for the chat experience, it’s now possible to post pictures and GIFs inline, videos can be embedded, and tweets can be shared all without leaving the interface. Friends can even be brought into an ongoing group chat simply by dragging their name into the chat window to trigger an invite being sent. The same can be achieved by sending a link to someone via email, message, or text.
If you play the same game regularly with others, Steam Chat allows you to create persistent group chats so that when you login and start playing again it’s easy to slide right back into a discussion without searching to see who’s online.
For voice chat, Valve rewrote the backend using WebRTC and Opus encoding. It means voice quality will be much higher (clear and crisp) and security is ensured as Valve uses encryption and voice data is only handled by Steam’s servers. Valve also made sure it’s very clear which of your friends are currently chatting allowing you to enter voice group chats with ease.
Will this be enough to unseat Discord for game chats? That’s unlikely in the short term, but what Valve is offering certainly looks enticing. I suspect we’ll see new gamers trying and sticking with Steam Chat while Discord users may give it a go and decide to switch. Ultimately both options will continue to gain in popularity.
