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Comment by emmelaich | Hacker News Reader

Maybe there's a niche for Valve/Steam to step into here. They already have your data, and many people use Discord for gaming related chat.

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You can already make steam friend group chats, it was just a bit janky when I last used it like 5 years ago

I primarily use Discord but also have a long-running Steam group chat.

Steam group chats are still janky and by no means a Discord replacement. It feels like an MVP that they lost interest in shortly after adding the feature.

It's fine for a couple people with no real need for moderation but beyond that I don't think it's currently viable.

Yeah, I was suggesting they make serious attempts to unjank it.

CurseForge (Overwolf?) tried with Curse Voice before Discord even existed, but it never made it big. Probably because Discord started taking over when Skype fell off (i.e. Discord had good timing, Curse Voice did not).

I've seen a lot of gamers mention this, but I'd wonder why it hasn't happened yet especially as there's a set of gamers that seem to love centralizing on steam already. One massive downside I can see is that the various public social areas of steam like the game forums are already a cesspool (and have been since they were vBulletin based) and I don't see that improving with more users in near real-time chat.

Discord getting used as a knowledge base or download source for some areas is already seen as a convenience for those involved or a single point of failure by many 'outside', I wouldn't want to see more of PC gaming moving to one place.

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