Today’s update enables a highly requested feature – Discord Voice on Xbox consoles allows you to talk with your friends and community while you play your favorite games. Planning a few rounds of multiplayer action in Halo Infinite with buddies on both console and PC? Exploring new biomes with your friends in Minecraft? See them already playing a game that supports cross-play? Connect to their voice channel and chat as you all play.
First of all, as someone who has spent the last however many X years professionally telling people about the coming metaverse and insisting that software platforms should be considered ‘worlds’ - its very interesting to see the use of the word worlds in the heading.
Secondly, Voice chat was launched as a day 1 xbox live feature in 2002. I have a whole chapter on how badly Microsoft fucked up voice chat/moderation/governance etc on the network in my book. But sufficed to say I belive that that Microsoft set humanity back decades with their poor handling of the voice network during its first 10 years.
This partnership shows that voice communication is now a mature enough ‘social technology’ in 2022. That people can be present (and civil) with one another across platforms and software stacks, is a significant cultural advancement. We will see more of this it won’t be long until we end up with new/adopted standard for voice chat like we used to have with xmpp.
The fact that this sort of partnership and interoperability is coming from he gaming space is also significant. Whats about to happen in the coming 5 years or so is going to be the death nell for lots of web2 players. There IS a reason Facebook has pivoted to ‘Meta’ - they see some of the writing on the wall.
Now that voice can cross worlds, it won’t be long until users demand save, secure interoperability between chat platforms for example.
