In game voice chat has been in demise ever since party chat was released on xbox 360 in November 19, 2008. At the time party chat was released not everyone had internet or could afford the xbox live fee to play online keeping in game voice chat very active. Even then party wasn't used, you could easily jump on halo 3 and have a communicating team, or a bunch of shit talkers...whatever way you look at it. Ever since then in game chat has been slowly dying out. More and more friends and family have been gaining access to xbox live making people want to stick to their social circles. If you jump on a game such as Battlefield 4 you're unlikely to hear a peep out of your team mates, which is quite staggering when you have 31 other team mates on the field with you.
Can you really fault party chat though? I mean it's what the consumer clearly wanted as it's become the preferred method of chat. There's no doubt that party chat has been a great feature in it's own way for the console market. Making it easier to communicate with out friends is always a good thing. That being said, it's hard to ignore that it has a negative impact on competitive multiplayer games. These days majority of competitive multiplayer games are designed so that communication is key. The more you communicate the more likely you are to win the game. There's nothing worse than going in to a ranked game and getting beaten by 30 kills, having absolutely no way to communicate with your team mates because they're in party chat.
All of that being said, I can definitely see why people have shunned in game chat. The screaming child, the loud background music, the guy who's just talking to his mate without paying attention to the game and the talking shit child. They are all very valid reasons to stick to party chat and never leave and none of these problems could ever be rectified apart from straight up muting the person. I personally understand this but some of the best moments have also come from in game chat, such as that warzone game type I played on gears of war 1. I was the last team mate alive against 4 others and I managed to steal the win Hearing 3 other team mates going crazy over your achievement left me feeling like a king. Stuff like this I don't forget and it's due to the in game chat.
Sometimes I'm playing Gta 5 and I hear someone screaming or yelling and shit talking over the mic, and I just get a nostalgic feel and I just jump in there and just start shit talking too. I actually miss that stuff, it was great back in the day.
The question is, is it time for xbox and playstation to do something about in game chat? It's just about dead for all competitive games. I think the best way to go about this is to make any hardcore/ranked game types in games to be mandatory in game chat with a very easy mute feature available for the screaming child.
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