Valve Expand Steam Multiplayer Server and Relay Networks to Non-Valve Games

Published: February 7, 2019 9:40 AM /

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Valve has made a move to keep 3rd party games as safe and usable as their own titles by making their Steam multiplayer servers and relay networks available to developers. Since Valve started steam their own games have been famous for their server reliability and their elegant solutions to preventing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. With this announcement that same level of reliability and protection will now be available to developers outside of Steam.

Since 2015 Valve have been moving their own games to private servers to help with better latency and to protect their servers from being taken offline. With this announcement, these same private servers are now available to everyone, both game and software developers. Access to these private servers for third parties will mean the likely hood of games being taken down by intentional attacks will be much lower than it was before. It is also likely that 3rd-party games using the servers will see improvement latency and response times.

The libraries which have been made available to developers also happen to be open source, allowing developers to make changes and iterations to tweak or improve their own usage of the network.

The readme file on the GitHub release page even reads:

"The main interface class is named SteamNetworkingSockets, and many files have "steam" in their name. But Steam is not needed. If you don't make games or aren't on Steam, feel free to use this code for whatever purpose you want."


Quick Take

This is an insanely cool move from Valve towards making gaming a safer and more reliable pass time. It's been a long time since Valve have truly been the 'golden boys' of gaming, but if they keep up moves like this they might just claw their way back again. 

 

What do you think of Valve's new open source approach to network security? Are there any games you'd like to see using the Steam multiplayer servers?  Let us know in the comments below!

Have a tip, or want to point out something we missed? Leave a Comment or e-mail us at tips@techraptor.net


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| Staff Writer

Will has been writing about video games professionally since 2016 and has covered everything from AAA game reviews to industry events and everything in… More about William