The facts are...
A
live chat held at intervals by
game developers that attempts to get feedback from the community. This usually envolves the use of an
IRC channel or if a game involves a more
dumbed-down crowd, a proprietary chat interface.
And my opinion...
This is a
terrible idea, as it usually ends up as a
total mess. Unfortunately, it seems as if the most noisy people playing a game also happen to be the biggest idiots. I'd say maybe 1 out of every 10 questions in these so-called chats are actually useful, even when the chats are
moderated. Usually an on-going,
fascist-operated IRC channel seems to do a better job than announcing some huge, everyone come on down to the devchat thing.