Video games are, by their very nature, a social experience. They’re something that people like to play together, be that sitting next to each other on the sofa or – more commonly, today – online. In order to play together, users need to be able to communicate digitally. While this can be done with text chat, that’s not as immersive or as convenient as simply talking.
Voice chat is natural; it not only allows players to focus on the game but also keeps their hands free to use their controller, mouse, and keyboard, phone, or whatever hardware they are using. This method of communication also means that consumers don’t need to step out of the experience or stop what they are doing in order to type out a message.
According to research from Tencent Cloud, over 90% of Chinese gamers prefer to interact with other players in an experience. 90.6% of consumers use the built-in voice chat function when playing a game, with 38.4% saying that they use the voice chat function often. When a title doesn’t have an in-game voice communication system in place, 73.7% of these players say they turn to a third-party service instead.
Data from chat platform Vivox also shows that people who use in-game voice chat play games not only more but also more often than those who do not. Globally, voice chat within video games has grown massively in popularity in recent years. Perhaps the most ubiquitous platform in the market right now is Discord, which has managed to attract over 250 million users between
its 2015 launch and May 2019. As of the end of 2020, the company boasted at least more than 140 million monthly active users, double the engagement it had 12 months prior.
While this growth was no doubt aided by people wanting to communicate and connect with people during the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, as opposed to purely playing games, it does speak to the modern tendency to want to use voice chat to engage with people online. With online worlds becoming increasingly prevalent – and as talk of the metaverse builds – giving users the ability to communicate using voice chat is of utmost importance. The massive success of titles like Fortnite, Roblox, and Among Us show that people not only want to spend time playing games; they want to do so with other people.
Video games are no longer products that people spend time with with intention of playing; they are places that users head towards to socialize, to hang out with friends. Titles like Fortnite are a digital destination not dissimilar to shopping malls or playgrounds. As a result, it’s vital that developers and publishers give players the tools to communicate as naturally as possible. The most obvious way of doing this is by implementing voice chat into their games.
Finding Your Voice
Of course, there are some challenges that might put developers off building voice chat into their projects. For one, due to the number of voice chat services out there, the quality that consumers expect from such a service is incredibly high. They won’t stand for long and noticeable latency times, nor will they be happy with connection problems that cause audio to freeze.
Depending on the type of game, having positional audio is also vitally important. This allows a player to know what direction their friends or foes are in relation to them; something that can mean life or death in genres like battle royale. Either not having this kind of functionality in
your game’s voice chat – or it being present, but implemented poorly – will likely result in frustration from users and has the potential to stop them from playing altogether.
Developers might also be cautious about building their own voice chat systems for games that are cross-platform due to the additional work that this might bring with it. For example,
creating voice chat for Sony’s new PlayStation 5 console – and making sure it works – is different to make sure your system works with the numerous Android mobile phones
that are out there in the wild. Making sure that these different platforms can communicate properly with one another introduces a wealth of additional frustrations, too.
Similarly, the global nature of online video games means that there is pressure on developers to make sure that whatever systems they implement in their games work around the world. Transmitting anything from one side of the planet to the other comes with its challenges and audio is no exception. As mentioned already, users want voice chat that is free of lag
and with quality that never drops. That’s without mentioning the localization work required to make sure your service is optimized and easily understandable by players from
every corner of the world.
All in all, while creating your own in-game voice chat solution is undoubtedly worth it, doing so not only comes with a huge number of pitfalls but can also be a huge cost to developers, in terms of both time and money. Thankfully, there are ready-to-use solutions out there, such as Tencent Cloud’s Game Multimedia Engine (GME).
Learn more about GME and download the complete whitepaper here or visit the GME product page.
Also published on: https://intl.cloud.tencent.com/resources/whitepaper/100203/