Quoting: F.UltraWell the problem is that some one have to pony up the servers/nodes necessary and apparently Valve have no interest in providing free such machines for their competition (wonder why).

If they are paid for the service by developers, it shouldn't matter.

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Server alone wasn't the issue for them, but NAT was, I suppose since rolling out their own NAT traversal is far from trivial.

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Quoting: x_wingStill, not an impediment to support multiplayer outside of Steam. If they decide to only use Steam network API (or GoG network API or whatever proprietary library), it definitely isn't because of a feature such as NAT traversal. For me that's just a vague excuse.

That's what developer claimed in my case when I asked about it. It doesn't need to be NAT traversal specifically. Any feature that's tied to Steam store, in the service that can be general purpose can cause such kind of problem.

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Quoting: bingusThe other day on Twitter someone asked them about Proton on the Epic store, they said they couldn't because of the tech they used.

That doesn't make much sense. If something is missing in Wine, they can add support, it's open source and CodeWeavers are open to contributions. And no one stops them from making their own custom Wine variant like Valve did with Proton, if some stuff is too hard to upstream.

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Quoting: x_wingBut they are not tied to Steam in order to provide multiplayer. This is optional and, as I said, you can have multiplayer support without NAT traversal in all the versions of your game without any extra work (the extra work is actually creating the abstraction layer in order to support Steam networking API).

You can have multiplayer without backend altogether, just run one instance as a server. I suppose most don't like that due to matchmaking logic and scalability issues.

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Sure, developers decide, but if they do want NAT traversal, they can't use Steam one without being tied to Steam. At least now.

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Quoting: Smoke39Until then, it doesn't sound to me like anything prevents you from rolling your own solution.

Nothing prevents you from rolling everything yourself, except cost and complexity. Some do roll out their own infrastructure or rely on generic cloud services. But many use Steam one because it's easy.

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Quoting: kuhpunktBut the situation will change. That's not even hypothetical. That's what the news is about.

Well, if it will - good.

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Quoting: kuhpunktNot YET untied.

Sure, we are talking about current situation, not about hypothetical improvements.

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Quoting: AnanaceIt would also easily explain why the service in question would be limited to Steam's services.

That doesn't explain why it has to be tied to Steam store. I.e. what stops such scenario:

1. Developer signs up for Steam network service for multiplayer (let's say it costs them something).
2. Developer uses that service and releases actual game in any store they want.

How is that worse than let's say using any generic service like AWS and such?

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