Steam's revamped chat client takes clues of discord

The revised Steam Chat Client is now available to all Steam users. The client, which stands as Valve's answer to Discord, was available in beta since June

The result: the client is a substantial improvement over the previous version, which required an update. The new customer's mantra is versatility. Steam Chat now supports group chat, differentiated channels, voice chat, and instant sharing of images and videos, including YouTube clips and GIF files. You can now easily see which friends are online and invite them to chat using a simple drag-and-drop system.

The new client obviously aims to provide a better gaming experience with friends. Being able to create groups on the fly and save them for future use is one of the most impactful changes. Now you can separate your group Counter-Strike: Global Offensive from your group League of Legends . If you want to invite a friend to play with you, you can do it with ease now. You can also send a link by e-mail, text or embedded message to the application to invite them to your game party.

Steam's voice chat uses WebRTC on its backend for security reasons. The voice chat is encrypted and goes through the Steam servers, not directly to your friends. This design keeps both your IP address and your location.

Valve has designed a new user interface for the chat, which she says facilitates the improvement of the Steam experience as a whole.

just the beginning. This update was developed using a new UI framework and includes significant architectural improvements, which allows us to make more frequent updates to our Web Steam components. There are many improvements to the overall Steam experience that we plan to address, and your feedback helps us prioritize the next step. "

The interface, as you'll notice in the screenshot above, looks like Discord, the main application for online game communication. It remains to be seen if Discord users will switch to the new and improved Steam chat client, but at least players now have an option that does not require Steam and Discord to be running at the same time.

The chat application is available via the client application and on browsers.