Valve’s money-making machine, Steam, is more than just a marketplace these days. It’s a hub for community creations, user feedback, and social interaction. Having its own dedicated friends feature allows Steam to give users an end-to-end experience when it comes to playing with others. Now, Valve has launched Steam Chat on Android and iOS.
The launch of the Steam mobile app a few years ago brought the Steam marketplace to your pocket, alongside most of Steam’s regular features. This, of course, meant that the Steam friends list and chat feature was included in the app. The chat feature functioned perfectly fine but left a lot to be desired in terms of user experience.
Steam’s overhaul of the friends feature in June of last year dragged it into the modern-day, bringing features such as group chats, embedded multimedia, and more. The Steam mobile app, however, was left behind.
Now, Valve has given Steam chat its own app, appropriately titled “Steam Chat.” The app has all the features of Steam chat on PC and looks fairly similar to it as well. There are some mobile-centric features added, such as only embedding images and other media when on Wi-Fi, which can be found in settings.
It’s clear that this is a well thought out app from Valve, and not something that they rushed out the door to coincide with the upcoming Steam UI overhaul. With that being said, it’s unclear why Valve felt that it was necessary to give Chat its own app, instead of updating the regular Steam app. They could have updated the entire app when the UI overhaul was released and made a nice tie-in.
Steam Chat is available on Google Play for all users now.
Steam Chat (Free, Google Play) →
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