Valve Goes After Discord With Steam Chat

rgMekanic

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Today Valve has announced "Steam Chat," and it looks an awful lot like DIscord. In fact, other than the Steam-ish skin, well and the fact it can be integrated into Steam, it's hard to tell the difference between Steam Chat and Discord. You can see what games everyone is playing, create groups or channels, and send and receive messages with text, pictures, video, tweets, and of course, voice. You also don't need a client, all of Steam Chat's features are available on the website as well, and you can even invite people with a link... just like Discord. Steam Chat is currently in beta, which you can join either in the Steam client, or the Steam Chat website.

Every chat on Steam is now multi-media friendly. Getting your point across is easier than ever, now that everyone can see your GIFs inline rather than a list of links. Paste a picture from the clipboard and upload it directly to the chat.
 
Wonder if it's just licensed from Discord with UI tweaks for steam??
 
Wonder if it's just licensed from Discord with UI tweaks for steam??

wouldn't surprise me.. way cheaper to do that then paying people to develop something that is already proven to work.
 
I just opted into the beta... Still looks like regular old steam chat to me with a new skin. I can attach photos and send off to friends now and start group chats.

It always told me what games my friends were playing and chats still appear in a separate window same as always.

Edit: I can def see the discord resemblance in the advertisement page for it though, I guess It's just not that far along yet on the steam beta version.
 
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In other news they are cutting off XP and Vista support: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=1558-AFCM-4577

I guess this is all in an effort to revamp the steam UI. I have an old XP gaming rig I play my old games on so this kind of sucks.

Might not even be that, but just because they don't wanna deal with support issues. It may keep working, just not be "supported". You see that will plenty of software. In the pro audio world is isn't uncommon to only see stuff support 8.1 and 10. In reality, most of it'll work on at least Vista, and often even XP or 2K, it is just they don't test it. If you want support, they want you to have a new OS.
 
As long as it isn't discord I'm in. They have no recovery options for 2fa so my account is simply gone. Long live our new steam overlords.
 
Might not even be that, but just because they don't wanna deal with support issues. It may keep working, just not be "supported". You see that will plenty of software. In the pro audio world is isn't uncommon to only see stuff support 8.1 and 10. In reality, most of it'll work on at least Vista, and often even XP or 2K, it is just they don't test it. If you want support, they want you to have a new OS.

Well I'm going by Valve's track record. They canned support for Win9x around 2007 and you cannot connect or download or play your games using old versions on windows 98 and haven't been able to for years. Not too big of a deal for 9x since most games were hard copy and offline in those days, losing original Counter-Strike on 9x annoyed me a tad but I got over it.

I understand it's not common and most people don't care, but at some point they will. There are a ton of games in my steam library that run infuriatingly bad or simply not at all in my Win 10 machine w/ Vega 64. So I keep a small Dell Studio with a Radeon 5770 on hand running XP 32-bit, and I game on it surprisingly often (must be my age).. Even "modern" games like TES:Oblivion run better on some of my older machines. Virtual machines don't cut it for me, Wine does somewhat. Solutions for running 32-bit XP era games on modern hardware are dismal at best.

I would really, REALLY like to see a bit of a push for a legacy alternative that at the least allowed us to launch steam in offline mode and continue playing games on our XP machines. I can't be the only one out there who would feel this way.
 
Well I'm going by Valve's track record. They canned support for Win9x around 2007 and you cannot connect or download or play your games using old versions on windows 98 and haven't been able to for years. Not too big of a deal for 9x since most games were hard copy and offline in those days, losing original Counter-Strike on 9x annoyed me a tad but I got over it.

I understand it's not common and most people don't care, but at some point they will. There are a ton of games in my steam library that run infuriatingly bad or simply not at all in my Win 10 machine w/ Vega 64. So I keep a small Dell Studio with a Radeon 5770 on hand running XP 32-bit, and I game on it surprisingly often (must be my age).. Even "modern" games like TES:Oblivion run better on some of my older machines. Virtual machines don't cut it for me, Wine does somewhat. Solutions for running 32-bit XP era games on modern hardware are dismal at best.

I would really, REALLY like to see a bit of a push for a legacy alternative that at the least allowed us to launch steam in offline mode and continue playing games on our XP machines. I can't be the only one out there who would feel this way.
Valve absolutely owes us a legacy client for us who still want to run these old games with correct hardware. I've purchased the games with intention of being able to still download and use them in the future. Honestly lost all trust in valve the past few years, they have no interest in protecting thier customers only getting new ones.
 
I don't care for these new game chat systems at all.

If I had to use one it would be TeamSpeak or maybe even go back to the old ass Ventrilo. If I can run my own server I'm in. If it resides on some faceless corporations cloud service, I'm out.

All things cloud really just need to die in a fire.

Screw that, IRC and Skype group-calls FTW.
 
Valve absolutely owes us a legacy client for us who still want to run these old games with correct hardware. I've purchased the games with intention of being able to still download and use them in the future. Honestly lost all trust in valve the past few years, they have no interest in protecting thier customers only getting new ones.

This is one of a number of reasons I advise buying games from GOG when possible instead of steam: They give you an installer that doesn't rely on their client, if you want it. You can download it and keep it around on local storage forever and never need to connect to the net.
 
I wonder if they will implement authentication systems for channels like Discord has done for guild chats.
 
obligatory xkcd and yes I am a heavy irc user


team_chat.png


My steam client updated last night. Unless there are persistent groups, I don't see how it would replace discord
 
Since some of my friends dont want to run anything else then steam for "social media" it will be nice to get some more functionality and usability out of it.
They left skype years ago and dont want anything to do with discord :/
 
Well they certainly don't seem to be fond of making their own stuff.


I understand that it's basically a meme at this point, but it's really not true.

They have said they are working on multiple titles and the most recent announced was Artifact, a card game based on DOTA, and reportedly mutliple VR titles.

It seems like they definitely are catering towards the games as a service aspect though, and trying to not just be one thing. Focus could be better, but they could be significantly worse too.
 
I understand that it's basically a meme at this point, but it's really not true.

They have said they are working on multiple titles and the most recent announced was Artifact, a card game based on DOTA, and reportedly mutliple VR titles.

It seems like they definitely are catering towards the games as a service aspect though, and trying to not just be one thing. Focus could be better, but they could be significantly worse too.

Eh...a card game is another cash grab by them...which is all they care about these days as far as I am concerned. Im not against VR, but I have interest in it either. If they come out with a truely new game (I have no hopes on Half Life 3 at this point and honesty don't want it...as at this point no matter what they do...im sure it be garbage), then ill change my opinion on them.
 
steam chat?... didnt they already have that? It worked ok, but discord is way better imo.
 
I would really, REALLY like to see a bit of a push for a legacy alternative that at the least allowed us to launch steam in offline mode and continue playing games on our XP machines. I can't be the only one out there who would feel this way.

Starting on January 1 2019, Steam will officially stop supporting the Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems. : https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=1558-AFCM-4577.

I don't play many dirt old games but most I've tried have had 3rd party updates to get them working under modern OSes.
 
Am I the only one who doesn't use Steam as a Social Media platform?


Nope. I dont even like the thing that shows what other people are playing. Those little pop-ups.. so and so is playing..GAMEX!


steam is my storefront for gaming. nothing more.
 
Half-Life 3 Confirmed!

Nope. I dont even like the thing that shows what other people are playing. Those little pop-ups.. so and so is playing..GAMEX!


steam is my storefront for gaming. nothing more.

You know you can disable those, right?
 
Here's a question: How do you make steam friends? I'm a loser with zero online gaming friends, barely play online, but no idea where friends are even made nowadays...
 
Just want to say, "It's about damn time."

I still miss the old layout for Servers in the Steam/C.S. 1.6 days. When Steam was just a clunkier replacement for Gamespy.
 
Here's a question: How do you make steam friends? I'm a loser with zero online gaming friends, barely play online, but no idea where friends are even made nowadays...

You play online, or, do like I do and add friends from real life.
 
Here's a question: How do you make steam friends? I'm a loser with zero online gaming friends, barely play online, but no idea where friends are even made nowadays...
I get tons of request from players that I have killed.
 
I liked Piper Chat, it seemed to be less sucky than Hooli Chat. Too many damn kids on there though...
 
we still use smoke signals and always try to stay within line of site with each other ... buffalo chips are running low though
 
These improvements to Steam Chat are a nice start. The comparisons to Discord in terms of UI and some of the added features are unmistakable, but that isn't a bad thing really given that Discord's general appearance and some of its features are greatly valued. However, I'd like to see Steam go above and beyond by not just replicating Discord's features (that IS a good start of course) but going farther in what Discord hasn't or won't do. A few things on my list are...

Full end-to-end , zero knowledge encryption for chat and video/voice. It doesn't necessarily have to be on all the time or for public rooms, but having the option to set a room or conversation as zero knowledge is a good start.
Open Sourcing the API to allow others to connect and make use of all those features even if they use other chat clients or whatnot. This could have tons of benefits not just to users but to Steam as well, being sure that say... gameplay status/join features, chat presence, offers to send Trade links etc... would work no matter if they were on Discord, Slack, Riot.im, or Steam itself etc.
Compatibility with Matrix.org standards/federation, which would extend Steam's reach out there in a user friendly, wide ranging way. I am not suggesting that Steam Chat be federated itself, but rather that it comply with Matrix.org so Steam would be seen as a valid Matrix server instance.

Valve (or at least Gabe Newell) was rather prescient when it came to things like the Windows Store and other services locking down their fiefdoms - every game company trying to push their own incompatible launcher etc. Much like their efforts with Steam for Linux and SteamOS adopting the above would be a way for them to push back against that, currying user favor in the process.
 
the new Steam chat client is out of beta...looks much better...the whole UI actually feels more responsive
 
Too little too late. I have no incentive to use this over discord, but it's a cool feature none the less.
 
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