INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Discord has risen among the ranks of gamers as the most common choice for game-related communications
And it easy to see why: it works well and the competition is pretty dismal
But Valve is looking to keep users in-house with an overhaul of the chat options on its game platform Steam .
It a welcome change, one of
many that Steam users have surely been asking for — the platform, while convenient in many ways, is also incredibly outdated in others
The friend and communications options may as well be ICQ, and let not get started on the browser.
Today news suggests that Valve has not
failed to hear gamers& cries
The revamped chat is very Discord-like, with text and voice channels listed separately, in-game details like map and game type listed next
to friends and a useful quick list for your go-to gaming partners
There also a robust web client.
Voice and text chat is all encrypted and passed through Steam servers, which prevents the NSA competition
from monitoring your squad tactics during PUBG games and griefers from tracing your IP and ordering a hundred pizzas to your door (or
worse).
It long past due for a platform like Steam, but more importantly it lets them keep Discord in check
The latter, after all, could conceivably grow itself a game store or promotions page in order to subsidize its free services — and that
would be stepping on Valve turf
Unforgivable.
That said, it far too late for Steam to steal away Discord users — it been adopted by far too many communities and the
benefits of switching aren''t really substantial
But for people who have not yet installed Discord, the presence of a robust chat and voice client within Steam is a powerful deterrent.
It
currently in beta, but you can request access here (web) and here (Steam)
No word on whether they are developing a whole system of chat icons based on those wiggly little egg-people in the top image
