Steam beta includes revamped friend list and group chats

Valve has unveiled a completely redesigned system for player communication in the new Steam beta. Adjustments have been made to the friends list, chat groups and voice chats. The functionality is largely similar to Discord.

Valve’s announcement suggests that in the new version, Steam users will have more space to organize their friends list by displaying favorites at the top. In addition, the list uses a new format, sorting friends by game and by team, as can be seen on a page previewing the changes. There is also more information about the status of friends, for example whether they are available to play a game.

Steam chat now also supports inline display of media such as videos, tweets, and gifs. Adding friends is possible by dragging them into a chat from the friends list. In this way it is also possible to start a group conversation, which can then be saved as a group. Invitations are also possible with links. In addition, separate channels and permissions can be created within groups. The preview shows that sending an invitation for a group conversation with speech is also one of the possibilities of a chat group.

Speech passes through the Steam servers and uses WebRTC and the Opus codec. According to Valve, speech is also encrypted. Among the other changes are an invisible mode, so that people in friends’ lists are shown as offline. Finally, the chat environment can also be accessed via a web client. The updates will eventually come to the stable release of Steam.

In a separate announcement, Valve also announced that support for Windows XP and Vista will be removed from Steam on January 1, 2019.