It now has much better quality voice chat, and supports discord-like rooms with multiple text and voice channels. It looks like they are trying to compete with discord and keep users on steam.
It now has much better quality voice chat, and supports discord-like rooms with multiple text and voice channels. It looks like they are trying to compete with discord and keep users on steam.
What would be their incentive for doing this? Are they just trying to get people further tied into the platform? I would think having your games within Steam would be enough incentive to keep...
What would be their incentive for doing this? Are they just trying to get people further tied into the platform? I would think having your games within Steam would be enough incentive to keep using Steam.
There's a few reasons, one is that their chat and voice (group voice especially) has been showing its age and general flakiness pretty badly lately. The other, probably much bigger, reason is...
There's a few reasons, one is that their chat and voice (group voice especially) has been showing its age and general flakiness pretty badly lately.
The other, probably much bigger, reason is keeping up with competition from Discord and maybe even Twitch. Discord is quickly running towards being a social gaming hub (detecting, displaying, and launching installed games, status integration, screenshare/streaming). Between Discord and Twitch, and with existing competition from the other less social storefronts, Steam is no longer the only/best way to launch games or communicate with your group of players and so they have some ground to make up.
If you only ever use Steam to purchase games, and then spend all your time in someone else's ecosystem (see that your friends are playing X in Discord, hop on and talk to them, directly launch the game from Discord to join the same party/server, etc.), that means that Discord has all the opportunities to show you other games, sales, or other ads that Steam currently has (or used to).
I know that for me, having Steam constantly running for the sake of the messenger (which I've used heavily in the past) means that I will randomly open the store frontpage or check my wishlist a lot more frequently than I otherwise would. If I completely replaced Steam Messenger with Discord (which is entirely likely for a lot of people) that wouldn't be happening nearly as much.
It now has much better quality voice chat, and supports discord-like rooms with multiple text and voice channels. It looks like they are trying to compete with discord and keep users on steam.
What would be their incentive for doing this? Are they just trying to get people further tied into the platform? I would think having your games within Steam would be enough incentive to keep using Steam.
There's a few reasons, one is that their chat and voice (group voice especially) has been showing its age and general flakiness pretty badly lately.
The other, probably much bigger, reason is keeping up with competition from Discord and maybe even Twitch. Discord is quickly running towards being a social gaming hub (detecting, displaying, and launching installed games, status integration, screenshare/streaming). Between Discord and Twitch, and with existing competition from the other less social storefronts, Steam is no longer the only/best way to launch games or communicate with your group of players and so they have some ground to make up.
If you only ever use Steam to purchase games, and then spend all your time in someone else's ecosystem (see that your friends are playing X in Discord, hop on and talk to them, directly launch the game from Discord to join the same party/server, etc.), that means that Discord has all the opportunities to show you other games, sales, or other ads that Steam currently has (or used to).
I know that for me, having Steam constantly running for the sake of the messenger (which I've used heavily in the past) means that I will randomly open the store frontpage or check my wishlist a lot more frequently than I otherwise would. If I completely replaced Steam Messenger with Discord (which is entirely likely for a lot of people) that wouldn't be happening nearly as much.