For the longest time, Steam’s built-in chat functionality has not been what I would call good. Today, though, Valve revealed a much-needed modern makeover, and you can try it now.
Steam’s new chat functionality makes friends lists more flexible, allowing you to see what friends are up to and organise people in a variety of ways, including – most intriguingly – by group. No bones about it: Steam’s new persistent group chats are basically Discord.
You can make individual channels, use voice chat in them, and even access your group chats through a web browser instead of Steam. They allow for embedded media and all that fancy (as of several years ago) jazz, too.
The new chat features are now in open beta. Valve says it will release the functionality in full when it’s “confident that things are working as they should, and we’ve finished up some of the features we have planned”.
Comments
11 responses to “Steam’s New Chat Is A Lot Like Discord”
Bit late there Steam.
Hey they’re only small billion dollar indie start-up company.
Give them some time, they still yet to have community managers. XD
It’s genius. Let the startups research, chop, change. Then when everyone seems happy…copy them.
Looks great.
what a shit show, there better be an opt out option.
or what?
Next up, Valve updates Steams file browser (for backing up and restoring games for example) to be as good as Win 3.1!
I know it’s not the best but can I ask what makes you compare it to Windows 3.1?
Lol nothing really man, its just _such_ a crappy file browser, that was the first GUI I really used so it popped into my mind
Why stop at the file browser? Why not make a whole game-centric OS? Oh wait…
What a silly idea. That would just encourage them to have a console based on that OS. Oh wait…