The gamer-centric chat software Discord displays in its user list the games your friends and channel-mates are playing. It's a handy way to tell what your pals are up to but not a terribly efficient system, especially if you have a lot of friends or haunt multiple servers. To address that shortcoming, Discord has added a new "Games Tab" function that enables users to more easily see what's going on, and to join in on the action.
Games Tab is basically a hub that pulls all game-specific information from across multiple channels and servers together in one place. It displays what people are playing and what they've played previously, and also incorporates game-specific news, integrated game launching, and other features, like spectating or multiplayer invites, that can be enabled through Discord's "rich presence." Spotify integration is in there too, so if you'd rather just kick back and share some tunes, that's an option as well: I can see that James, for instance, is currently grooving to the Samorost 3 soundtrack. (Get back to work, James.)
Discord's improvements to its game integration features arrive just behind Valve's big upgrade to Steam's chat functionality—by all appearances, an obvious attempt to muscle in on Discord's turf. I wouldn't necessarily view this as a pushback (it takes time to make these things happening, so Games Tab was certainly in the works long before Steam announced the Valve chat overhaul) but it is interesting to see how everyone is headed in more or less the same direction.
Discord also rolled out a new Colorblind Mode today, a step that it said will make the platform "more inclusive to everyone."
