Faced with Discord, Steam goes to the offensive with new messaging and voice chat

The change was slow, but it's finally here. The new chat for Steam, in beta since June, has just been deployed for all users. An update that makes it more readable and offers more or less the same advantages as its direct competitor Discord (130 million users), which it imprints quite clearly the ergonomics and the graphic charter.

It must be said that the latter has become the favorite chat system of many PC players in just a few years. A rather awkward situation for the biggest online gaming platform.

Group chats are more readable and allow to create different text channels with moderation options, by adding colleagues via an invitation link . Ideal to create a group of friends evolving on the same title, and to find them more easily. Especially since the interface tells you if they are already playing together or not. Steam details these features in the official announcement.

• Keep your favorite friends, groups and cats at the top of your buddy list and stay on top of what matters most to you.
• Your friends in games are now grouped by game to allow you to easily join them or see at a glance the popular games among your friends.
• Observe who plays together. You can see friends enter a game and then exit when the game is over. Get ready to dive in with them or play when they're done.
• Some games can now display detailed statuses in the friends list. Where are your friends in a game, if they are in the middle of a match or have just started …
• Invite a few friends for an impromptu conversation or create a larger and less ephemeral group on the games you play or the subjects

It is also possible to send pictures and GIFs and the conversation history is kept for two weeks. We can now go on these via the web browser, which was not the case before.

The vocal part has also improved since Steam chose WebRTC technology with encoding Opus. Clearly, all the content exchanged are encrypted. It is currently recommended to go through Chrome either by the client to discuss. Be that as it may, this rethinking is likely to be welcome.