We're thrilled to announce the return of GamesBeat Next, hosted in San Francisco this October, where we will explore the theme of "Playing the Edge." Apply to speak here and learn more about sponsorship opportunities here. At the event, we will also announce 25 top game startups as the 2024 Game Changers. Apply or nominate today!


Online gaming is increasingly becoming a team activity. But communicating in large groups over the internet has never been easy.

Voxli is one of the companies trying to fix that. The company announced an open beta today for its browser-based voice-chatting system for gamers.

Skype and Google Talk may work fine for the general population. But gamers are particular. They often meet in groups of 20 or more people, and they need group chat rooms that they can return to often for regularly scheduled game sessions. Ventrilo, Mumble and TeamSpeak all offer voice chat clients for hardcore gamers. And Vivox is integrating its voice-chat system into games.

But Andrew Ow, co-founder of Voxli in Mountain View, Calif., said his company is trying to make the clients easier to use and easy to integrate for casual games, or games with short time frames that appeal to broader groups than just hardcore gamers. The company says as many as 200 gamers can participate in the same chat.

Event

GamesBeat Next 2023

Join the GamesBeat community in San Francisco this October 24-25. You’ll hear from the brightest minds within the gaming industry on latest developments and their take on the future of gaming.


Learn More

With Voxli, it isn’t necessary for gamers to set up their own servers. They get a small client and then can use it either outside or inside a game by pressing a single key. That style of communication is called “push to talk.” You’d use Voxli outside a game to find out where your friends are playing, for example.

The company is a Y Combinator startup that has received $15,000 so far. It has two people on staff and was founded about a year ago. The company is not raising money now. Over time, Voxli will add other features that let a user make voice communications private. It will also improve sound quality with echo cancellation technology, which helps remove background noise. The company will charge users a flat subscription fee for the service. The fee will vary depending on the number of users per room.

The company hosts the chat rooms on its own servers, which are hosted by server-outsourcing companies such as Amazon Web Services. That makes it a lot easier for the company to get to market. Voxli happens to be one of the entrants in the Who’s Got Game? startup competition at VentureBeat’s GamesBeat 09 game conference on March 24.

GamesBeat's creed when covering the game industry is "where passion meets business." What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you -- not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it. Discover our Briefings.