Steam/Steam Chat

Steam Chat (formerly Friends) is a instant messaging feature on Steam, which allows players to chat with friends.

It was later updated in July 2018, with it's UI redesigned using CEF, and adds new features (Group Chat, Rich Presence, Emoticons (emojis), Voice Chat support, and more) that were compared to Discord. Steam Chat can be also accessed through web browser.

In Valve engines and previous Steam versions

When Steam was launched, alongside with the first Steam build of Half-Life (in 2003), and the release of Half-Life 2, when it was known as Steam Friends, the chat UI was based on VGUI2, and was very barebone (lacking many features). You can add friends, set status, edit profile, and play Parlor Games (Checkers, Chess, Go, Hearts and Spades) with friends.

In older version of GoldSrc and Source (Source 2004 and Source 2006), there is a "Friends" menu option which opens up Friends window, as Steam Overlay wasn't present back then.

Both engines (and Steam) had two versions:

• Friends v1 - The first version features Parlor Games. This version of Friends no longer works as it relies on deprecated Steam API or Steam server which has been offline.
• Friends v2 - The second version (introduced in January 30, 2006), also referred as Friends Beta. This version removes Parlor Games, but much of it was identical. It still works with latest Steam client (from 2025), but it was buggy (chat doesn't show up in-game, but does on Steam client), this is because of some Steam API features are deprecated because of security reasons and/or simply outdated.

Friends are eventually removed in all GoldSrc and Source games in July 31, 2007, as Steam Overlay replaced many of it's functionality. This didn't applies to Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Lost Coast until May/June 2010 engine update and Mac release (for Half-Life 2), and 2013 (for Lost Coast) during SteamPipe and Source 2013 engine update, as both games continued to run on Source 2004, which was last updated in April 6, 2006 and did not receiving any updates that remove the Friends feature.