Steam Adds Chat Facility To Compete With Discord

Popular digital distribution platform, Steam, is all set to revamp its platform with the addition of texting and voice chat features. Although popular for being a platform that users can download games and updates, it has now decided to make a change in the way it can be used as it looks to compete with Discord.

A direct competitor to Discord?

Steam, which is owned by Valve Corp, is looking to leverage its user base in a bid to compete with popular gaming chat platform, Discord. Currently, Discord, which is a freeware app, is the largest platform for gamers from across the work to chat and use audio and voice over internet protocol to communicate with fellow gamers.

Although discord is used by a few other groups, it is largely associated with and is popular with the gaming community. While Steam has been around for a while, Discord was launched only 3 years ago in 2015 and the platform has had phenomenal success and has, in fact, moved lots of users away from Steam to its own platform since its launch.

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Steam’s Beta and the app’s new features

In a bid to fight back and regain some of its lost users, Steam has decided to develop the chat and voice features onto its platform, similar to the features available in Discord. In fact, the company had also launched a beta version of its app, dubbed as Steam Chat, which received reasonable reviews upon release. Now the company is looking to add new features mostly in the form of changes in design and more chat options.

The original beta app had brought in a number of features similar to Discord, including different channels for text chats and voice chats. The app now also features in-game maps and also allows users to place a label next to friends, indicating the game they participate in.

Now with the update, the app includes the ability for users to share GIFs, video links as well as rich social links with their friends/contacts in the Chat app. Apart from this, you can now organize your friend list, a feature that wasn’t available before. Users can categorize friends by the party as well as by the games that they participate on, maintain a group chat specific to a game similar to Discord and also sort your friends by favourites and preferences. Users can also create channels like Discord and can send out links with invites to new users and users from other groups. Most importantly the chats also feature voice chat features.

The big question – will Discord users switch back to Steam?

While all these new features are a welcome change to many users of Steam, the big question will be if the company will be able to convince users to switch from Discord to Steam. While Steam is largely seen as a gaming store by users, Discord has become the default app that gamers use for gaming chats.

In fact, the gaming chat platform has become one of the most used social media platforms, with a whopping 130 million users that are registered with Discord. This is a fairly large user base, which is what Steam is eyeing and they will do well to get even a small percentage of this user base back.

One of the biggest reasons why Steam is looking to pick some of the Discord’s user base is because, with such a large user base that is solely dedicated and revolving around gaming, Discord could launch its own storefront to rival the likes of Steam, EA, Ubisoft and Microsoft. While there is no such indication from Discord, Steam would like to be in a stronger position to negate such a threat.

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