Long-awaited change is coming to the Steam client and with it a brand new chat UI.

That's according to leaks from a Russian forum - as spotted by friends of PCGamesInsider.biz, PCGamesN - which has details about what new features will be coming to the PC platform.

This new chat client sounds a lot like Discord, with the ability to create and save group chats and generate links to invite new people to existing chats. Nicknames will be assignable - dangerous in the wrong hands - while improved voice chat is also on the way.

Existing social features on Steam, such as being able to see what users are playing and so on, also seem to be integrated into this new feature set.

Beta testing for this new service will apparently start soon, meaning we could see a roll out by the end of 2018.

Nothing has officially been revealed by Valve just yet, but we imagine we'll be hearing more about this very soon.

This follows changes to how Steam handles profiles. Before they were public by default; now they are private, which was bad news for third-party research site SteamSpy. 

Steam following in the footsteps of Discord does make sense; that game-centric communications app has gone from success to success, gathering 130m users in total. Its userbase has in fact tripled in the last year. We caught up with CEO Jason Citron to see what was driving this growth.