Dear Teamspeak Developers & Community

General Discussion
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Dear TeamSpeak Developers and fellow diehard Teamspeak users,

I started out as an X-Fire user, then moved through Ventrilo, Mumble, Curse Voice—but through it all, TeamSpeak has remained the steadfast standard. It has stood the test of time as an industry leader for reliable, high-quality voice communication, the go-to for serious users across gaming communities and large-scale events. I remember TeamSpeak 3 being the trusted choice for Riot-sponsored tournaments and Arma 3 independent squads alike. Eventually, I committed to running my own server on OVH, keeping it alive since 2011. Today, that same server costs me $120 per month.

The community, however, is dwindling, and we all know that Discord’s extensive features have been a significant factor. Honestly, I’m on the brink of closing this chapter. It feels like it would take a relatively modest investment in the right development team to breathe new life into TeamSpeak with a few months of dedicated work, refactoring, and modernizing features. Though I’m not a developer (but I am a software engineer), aren’t there open-source repositories for platforms close to Slack and Discord that could speed up this process? The ambition and potential of TeamSpeak 5 seem so close, yet year after year, we see delays and radio silence.

There’s no clear roadmap, no call for beta testing or community involvement, and no openness to embracing the resources or collaboration that could push this project forward. It feels like the vision for TeamSpeak is lost in a “paralysis by analysis,” and the passion for its future is lacking from those who control its destiny.

Please, let’s bring back the momentum, transparency, and sense of community that made TeamSpeak so strong in the first place. TeamSpeak deserves better—and so do we.

note: this is a big brain rant post that I told ChatGPT to touch up. every sentence is still mine, just with synonyms and punctuation.

And note on not extending beta access thing above, I have an account on this forum only because that’s what this website told me was the only way to get beta access, and I wanted to contribute. I’ve waited long enough.

All it takes to win is CTRL+C CTRL+V competitors best features, but make it private.

2 Likes
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I would agree with most of the parts of this post. I’ve been using TeamSpeak since 2006, when there was TS2. My friends are trying to convince us to switch to Discord and we’re still waiting for screenshare for more than a year. Last update was in december 2023, I’m slowly losing faith in this project tbh.

Mobile apps are not working as they should, no UX / UI improvements, media sharing is buggy (limited to 5MB), cracking sounds on specific microphones, … so many issues but here is still silent.

I think that should change, open communication would be much better than silence. The only advantage that TeamSpeak has now is low latency - self hosting, otherwise client is obsolete. It looks like mIRC for chatting 2024.

I’m running left of a reasons to convince my friends to keep using TeamSpeak and probably I’m not the only one.

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I’m curious what’s so expensive about your server. Is it the license for a large community? Cause I’ve been running my 32 slots server for literally 1$/month on a VPS for years.

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The price wasn’t so much to highlight the growth of the Teamspeak server, rather to highlight that Teamspeak was the start of something special and remained the center of it all through the years, through thick and thin, that it can last this long on such a host, but will soon no longer make sense to maintain. It started as a $3 VPS with TeamSpeak being the main function, and eventually made its way to bare metal dedicated host. Everything but TeamSpeak is growing around the TeamSpeak.

I still use the server for personal projects / containerized game server hosting / etc., but I may as well power on my decommissioned R730 for personal projects, rent game servers when needed with the crew, and go Discord, and go back to the 3$ VPS for website hosting.

It’s getting to a point now where Discord functionality beats TeamSpeak’s privacy. My security oriented friends who went Discord years ago pointed out to me that TeamSpeak has MyTeamSpeak integration requirements (according to him) now, so the privacy aspect is even questionable.