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My Impressions of the Steam Community Beta

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Steam community is the much anticipated unofficial rival to Windows Live that valve has been developing for some time. A while back they announced it would be released in July and yet here we are in August, but atleast we have a beta to play around with.

Upon activating the beta through the regular version of steam (an extremely easy process) steam then restarts and has an added tab called "community". From this tab you can keep track of any events you have coming up, what groups you belong to, and any invites you have. Your friends are displayed on the right hand side and you can see if they are in game, chatting, or online.

Something I was most impressed with was the groups. Upon being invited to a group you can go to that groups homepage and it will list all of the avatars of each group member and above that will give you a count of who is chatting and who is in game. If you mouse over these counts it will highlight the avatars with the corresponding colors (green for in game and blue for chatting). Groups also contain their own chatroom which you can talk to from inside and outside a game.

While ingame you can hit Shift+Tab to bring up the Steam Community. It seems very well integrated.

Overall I think Valve is heading in the right direction. With some more features Steam Community could become a major with Windows Live.

https://steamcommunity.com/

Alex

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Comments

Kevin SeiterSeiter Tuesday, August 14, 2007 11:33:35 PM

I remember when Steam first came out and I was big into CS. From the day it was released, it was sooo buggy and I remember complaining for weeks about how crappy it was. It's startling to see how much more polished and popular it is now. Poor Vivendi.

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