Why is video chat limited to 4 people?

[GigaBowser]

I'm not sure if this has been covered before, but I couldn't find anything about it, so I'm asking. Like it says in the title, why is the video chat limited to only 4 people? I assume it's because of resource/bandwidth issues, but I feel the cap should be removed for Premium players. Audio is fine, but the video inside the avatar box makes it easy and fun to see each other. I'm a premium member, and I like to play 7 Wonders a lot, which means I'm often playing with 5-7 friends. Is there any way the video chat cap might be increased in the future?

[Een]

Hello,

Audio/Video chat was developed for BGA several years ago using WebRTC technology. This technology was experimental at the time, and the advised use case was 2 people. So however it may look today after the "zoom boom", extending it to 4 people for video chat and 10 for audio was actually a little bullish at the time

This is already a premium feature, because as you surmise, it has a specific bandwidth cost. But cost is not the main reason of this limit on the number of participants, it's more a question of having a stable use case, both for establishing connection and for not hogging down the browser (displaying multiple streams is resource intensive, and technology is like magic for people not working on it: so if something works on their brand new desktop computer, people will expect it to work on their 5 years old tablet).

We actually have an ongoing project to refresh our implementation of audio/video chat, so this limit may be lifted in the coming weeks/months. No specific timing defined at the moment though.

[GigaBowser]

Thank you, that is an informative and helpful response! Personally, I'm not so technologically naive as to expect a resource-intensive video chat to work on a potato, lol, which is why I have my high-end computer running it. I do imagine some people would think that way, though.

I'm happy to hear that there may be an upgrade in the works, because that would be welcome news indeed. Thanks again for helping me understand what's going on, and here's hoping for good things to come!