Valve introduces a revamped Steam Chat set to take on Discord

Discord has become the de facto chat tool for gamers. It offers a sleek design that makes it easy for huge numbers of gamers to congregate in a group and coordinate. Pretty much the antithesis of Steam Chat, a clunky and outdated service that’s only really used as a last resort. Valve is looking to change that though, with their newly revamped Steam Chat.

The new Steam Chat offers some great features that come as standard with other services. You can now add favourite friends, groups, and chats to the top of the chat window for easy access. Online friends are now grouped by what game they are playing. You can also see what exactly a friend is doing in the game, whether sitting at the main menu or currently in a match. In addition, Steam Chat can now show you which of your friends are in a party together.

Group chats, probably one of the biggest features available on Discord, has been revamped on Steam Chat. It is now easy to really create a community using the service, you can send game invites from within groups, and create separate channels within those groups too.

The chat experience has been updated, allowing users to embed video, pictures, tweets, gifs, and much more. Voice chat has also been rebuilt from the ground up, with Valve saying it now sounds a lot cleaner than it did before. It also comes with end-to-end encryption for added privacy and security.

The new Steam Chat was released today and is available now via the Steam Beta option you which you can find in Settings and then Account. If you are already enrolled in the beta releases, you may have to restart your client to get the new chat features. The new Steam Chat is also available through your web browser.

KitGuru Says: Steam Chat desperately needed an overhaul to get with the times, and it looks as though this has pretty much everything you could need in a chat client. Do you think that the new Steam Chat has what it takes to bring down Discord?

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