How to Use Valve’s New Steam Chat App
Steam has been primarily a gaming marketplace for PC games over the years, but Valve appears to be doubling down on the social aspects of the platform by releasing the recently launched Steam Chat messaging app for Android and iOS .
While Steam Mobile has been allowing users to manage their accounts and send messages from their smartphones for years, Steam Chat splits the platform’s messaging service into its own dedicated app. However, Steam Mobile isn’t going anywhere; both apps will exist at the same time: Steam Chat is for chatting, and Steam Mobile is for other parts of the service, such as buying games, starting remote downloads, and securing your Steam Guard account.
Here is the complete list of Steam Chat functions at startup, according to the official blog post Valve, in which the advertised application:
- Friends List: instantly see who’s online or in the game. Never miss an opportunity to play.
- Rich Chat: Make your chats even better with more accurate links, videos, tweets, GIFs, Giphy, Steam emoticons and more.
- Invite Links: Add new friends on Steam using a link. Create an invitation link that you can send by text or email.
- Customizable notifications: Mobile notifications mean you never miss a message or game invitation. You can set up notifications for each friend, group chat and chat channel.
- Group chats: get everyone on one page. Groups make it easy to keep in touch with communities and organize play nights with your best friends.
Some of Steam’s desktop chatting features are missing from Steam Chat at launch, such as voice chat, but Valve confirmed in a blog post that these will be added soon.
Steam Chat appears to be primarily aimed at existing Steam users – and PC players more broadly – but the app’s features resemble many other messaging services on smartphones . Unsurprisingly, Steam Chat includes the same capabilities as the mobile app for one of Steam’s budding competitors, Discord . By dividing Steam’s messaging functionality into a separate app, Valve appears to be looking to expand the service’s appeal. After all, you can create a Discord server for any topic right now; why not a Steam group?
After downloading and installing the app, you need to log into your Steam account (or create a new one) and verify the device using the verification code sent to your email. Once you’re signed in, you can send messages to your friends on Steam from outside your computer, and without having to install the main Steam app.
If you do decide to try the new app, Valve will be interested in receiving user feedback through the official Steam Community page for the Steam Chat app . So far, there are reviews from Steam users … well, you could say “mixed”. Here are some excerpts from the comments on the Steam announcement:
Manatee-Nyan! ♥ Lamp Post: “Please combine this with a regular Steam app, there is no reason to create 2 separate apps. It is annoying, but inconvenient. “
Miro ??: “Could you then at least update Steam Guard to use the damn regular 2FA system so I can just use something like authentication to remove all Steam apps from my phone. The correct Steam app has been broken for years with zero updates and no one else even uses chat because every time I receive a chat message I have to find who first sent me a message as the app doesn’t tell me about it “.
Waldimert: “Discord wins with group chat, especially on mobile. I have no idea why the time was wasted on this. I would prefer to keep the Steam app up to date. It is tiresome ♥♥♥♥♥ to browse the store, buy a game and try to install the game remotely. “
m4x7us: FINALLY
Hallo ich bin Grunspan: “How about FINAL ENCRYPTION ALREADY instead of letting Steam read and parse all of our lyrics? Also, how difficult can it be to add some sort of chat history feature that completely saves all of your chats to a text file or something? “