Discord and Steam Chat: Where is the best app for gamers?

Discord's debut in 2015 shocked the gaming world. Discord grows rapidly and currently has more than 250 million users. After years of realizing that his chat system is lagging behind, Steam has overhauled it to provide better friend list management, improved voice quality, and multimedia chat and many other improvements.

But what about mobile experience? Both Discord and Steam have mobile apps, so gamers can connect with friends even on the move. This article will compare two Discord and Steam Chat applications to see which apps are best for gamers.

What is Discord and Steam Chat?

Discord is the chat application available for desktop and mobile devices. It targets gamers and encourages them to join the community to chat with people with similar interests. These communities or servers can be based on anything related or unrelated to the game.

On Discord, you can chat, make voice calls, video calls, even talk to your friends privately and it's free. Although you can pay the registration fee for Discord Nitro to get better quality video, a larger upload limit, downloadable games, but this is definitely not necessary.

Valve launched Steam in 2003 and this is primarily a game distribution platform. In fact, it is one of the most popular online game stores. In 2018, Steam Chat added new features. This is a mobile application for chatting with Steam's friends. It's completely free and doesn't require any fees.

It's hard to understand that there is another Steam mobile app that can be used to chat with friends, with other features like the game store, two-factor authentication, but this is a more basic app. Many people need both of these applications for a full Steam experience.

Discord vs Steam Chat: Design and interface

Both Discord and Steam Chat offer a modern and easy-to-use interface. The interface of Steam Chat looks more compact, mainly because it has fewer features than Discord.

Steam Chat mainly consists of three main sections: Friends, Chat and Groups and you can customize the tab to open the application. Players can add specific friends or groups to favorites for easier navigation when there are many friends. In addition, it has some useful settings such as hiding offline friends and downloading media only on Wifi networks.

With Discord, you need more time to get used to its interface even though it is better designed. You can switch left panel to change between groups, switching from voice channel to chat by text and vice versa. Discord provides many settings in settings such as switching between light theme and dark theme, changing the action of sending messages that Steam Chat does not have, adjusting the font rate and more.

Discord vs Steam Chat: Multimedia chat

Online messaging has been around for a long time since Internet Relay Chat (IRC). And now we still use the key words to communicate but prefer to use more emoticons, GIFs and videos.

Steam Chat offers a number of custom built-in emoticons for gamers to use. In addition, you can also turn your Steam trading card into an emoticon and use Unicode emoji by selecting it on the phone keyboard.

Discord has more emoticons. You can select all emoji Unicode from the client, use custom emoticons added by the server admin in chat messages with friends. If you have Nitro, you can even use emoticons from other servers as a member.

GIFs, images and videos are processed almost the same on both applications. You can download them directly from the phone or paste a link to embed it into the conversation. However Discord is better than Steam Chat in that it allows you to choose GIF images from the phone keyboard (if available).

Discord vs Steam Chat: Call voice and video

Discord supports voice and video calls for one-to-one chats and groups. Many users reflect on Discord voice and video calls easily, quickly and smoothly. When calling, your voice is automatically transmitted when detected or via the Push to talk feature. You can even use other apps while chatting.

Steam Chat does not provide this functionality, although Steam's desktop version has a voice call feature. If a friend of yours is using the desktop application and calling you, you will receive a message saying you have opened a voice call but cannot join the call. This is not a problem if you like chatting in writing.

Discord vs Steam Chat: Manage groups

Discord focuses heavily on group management. You can easily switch between groups and then join the voice or text channel with the left panel. You can also add Discord friends to the group or create time-limited links to invite others. In addition, gamers can create their own groups within minutes. As a group admin, you have the right to censor, set user roles, add channels, add emoticons and more.

Although the Discord desktop application has a group search function that makes it easy to get involved in the community, mobile apps still don't support this. So, if you want to join another group, you need to get an invitation link or find a link from websites like Discordbots.org.

Steam Chat has two separate tabs for Chats and Groups. Chats are used to chat with one person, while Groups for group chat. With Steam Chat you can easily create groups by opening a chat with someone or adding others directly to the group. Alternatively, you can go to the Groups tab and create groups from scratch. Players can create links to send other people outside Steam Chat to invite them to the group. Feature set the time for links to avoid misused links.

The only downside of Steam Chat is that it does not support public groups. On desktop computers, Steam has groups for all of its games and community-created groups.

Discord vs Steam Chat: Which application is the best?

Your decision to use Discord or Steam Chat may depend on the service most of your friends use.

Overall, Discord is a far superior application. It seems that Valve is trying to keep up, but its Steam Chat application lacks the important and quality features that Discord provides such as media embedding, voice and video chat, group support.