Steam Chat rolled out Discord-like Chat Features to all Users

To remain in the competition Valve rolled out Steam Chat with new text and voice features which are inspired from Discord along with the similar appearance of the competitor. The Steam Chat has been made available for all from Tuesday. The company has launched the beta version earlier in June which was more robust Steam Chat. Now, all the new features are live for all the users.

At the beginning when Steam Chat started its journey it was the easiest ways to talk to your friends about games and later the chat communities evolved with time but Steam Chat failed to keep pace and where Discord was the answer to cater the new online communities with better options and interestingly purely inspired from Steam Chat and claimed around 130 million registered users which show the popularity of the voice chat app for PC gamers.

Now Steam Chat could be said to reflect ideas from Discord by providing persistent voice and text channels for friends to drop in and out of, support for embedding videos, pictures, and tweets in conversations and invite simply anyone to a group chat by simply sending them a link. The new interface looks completely fresh and with design elements more vibrant and real. The easier ways like to add a friend in a voice chat by dragging and dropping in friend’s list in the chat window makes the update straight in approach.

Among other ideas which could be said to be inspired from Discord are sharing of GIFs and social and video links, categorise friends by choices, one can form a group with friends for games and parties and could maintain group chats exclusivity. To reclaim Discord users Steam Chat seems to have enough but with the strongest base of users having deeply rooted communities the quest would be really tough.

Game analytics firm SuperData Research said by capturing and retaining the identities of tens of millions of PC gaming fans, Discord is perhaps the only platform that could rival Steam when it comes to game distribution.

“Previously, Steam was invaluable not only because of its storefront, but because it facilitated social connections between players,” SuperData research manager Carter Rogers told Variety back in June. “In 2011, Electronic Arts got flak after breaking away from Steam to form its own storefront, Origin. At the time, players feared a slippery slope of multiple companies leaving Steam, resulting in the need to maintain friends lists across a wide range of platforms. Now, Discord is where gamers’ main friends lists live, not Steam.”