It's been kept around because they treat their customers ok, but they absolutely exsanguinate their developers.
And their engineering culture is... odd. They hire senior people and then let them all fuck sound aimlessly. Their APIs are terrible, their infrastructure is all over the place, they still have patch Tuesdays. But because they are the landlord that owns every house in town, what are you going to do, not pay rent?
Gabe is out there cruising the world in a billion dollar yacht, eating thousand dollar meals. All that came off the backs of developers who actually make the games.
This is true, but "treat their customers ok" goes a long way. When everybody else severely abuses their customers, the one company that doesn't generates a lot of goodwill.
May be? It's absolutely evil in a lot of ways. It's an active participant in multiple genocides at the moment. And has been for a long time.
I guess it could be worse, but being stuck laboring under Saruman's orcs and pointing at Mordor and going "At least we aren't over there" isn't exactly a defense of the situation.
Hell, they even buy timed exclusive access to certain games
And yet. Steam persists
https://www.fortnite.com/news/fortnite-developers-will-soon-...
Unless you're inside Fortnite, where Epic takes a 63% cut of any 'in game item' you sell, and you don't have a choice of storefront inside the game.
Rules for me, but not for thee, so sayeth Timmy Tencent as he collects his next ten cents of revenue from a twelve year old.
By "everyone" I mean game studio owners. They're desperate to not pay 30% to Valve / Sony / Apple / whatever.
The vast majority of people that work at game studios don't really care about that, they see a shrinking fraction of the profits of their employers and worsening conditions.
From what I can tell, that 30% cut gets you -for the rest of forever-
* distribution for both the current version of the game and some number of older versions you choose to make available [0]
* a place in their searchable games index [1]
* "cloud" storage for your players' savegames
* basic forum and blog hosting for discussion of and news about your game
From what I could tell as someone who used to buy games in retail stores, in a bricks and mortar distribution unless you were -like- the Starcraft/Diablo/Warcraft boxed set, you got like maybe a half year of time on the shelf. I've heard folks say that you had to pay a 50->80% cut for that.
[0] Valve will even distribute games that don't work anymore. This is both good and bad, but Steam's no-hassles refund policy combined the existence of unofficial patches that make games work on current versions of Windows make me generally fine with charging for and distributing games that no longer work as-is.
[1] ...at least until the wrong horde of pearl-clutching busybodies demand that credit card companies require your game be erased from the commercial world because it is art that discusses those busybodies' bugbear du jour
https://www.reddit.com/r/xonotic/comments/1tyqx5w/i_ported_x...
If you're giving away free games and can barely manage to attract people to your storefront, you might be doing something wrong.
In their defense I suppose, most other competitors weren't much better. I don't think anyone misses Origin, and you'd have to pay me to spend any amount of time on Ubisoft's storefront. Only GOG comes close, and they earn a lot of good will in other ways.
Perhaps game devs get a whole bunch of "gee whiz" features from the Steam Platform that Epic Games doesn't provide, but I -personally- couldn't care less about those.
That said, Steam has a rather absurd CDN.
What I've observed is
* when Steam downloads are in progress, between four and nine logical CPUs worth of processing power on my 32-way Threadripper are being used and zero logical CPUs are running at 100%
* when EGS downloads are in progress, exactly one logical CPU on that Threadripper is pegged at 100%
It's true that you can do gigabit downloads without having a multithreaded downloader. [0] But it seems to be true that the two biggest PC-game-store clients absolutely cannot... for whatever reason. Given the prevalence of gaming machines that have CPUs with four or more logical CPUs, I expect it's not really worth the effort to make whatever Steam is doing single-threaded, or whatever single-threaded thing EGS is doing fast enough to saturate a 1gbit+ download.
[0] One widely-deployed example would be SSH/SCP.
WebRTC works as fallback. WebRTC is encrypted and cant be used for much else.
STUN in the otherhand is unencrypted and the protocol itself can be used for DDoS reflection/amplification. I would not be surprised if this is somehow weaponized and/or blocked/analyzed in real time that then breaks the connectivity.
WebRTC clients take that STUN/TURN response and send to peers through out-of-band, through e.g. a lobby server chat mechanism, to set up the connection. This allows NAT table entries to be created as if they are outbound connection at both ends.
You can't make P2P connection with STUN/TURN alone. STUN/TURN is just a tool required for WebRTC.
If you can make all the STUN servers fail from the perspective of the clients, you could hypothetically force them to use TURN servers that are more centralized and easier to spy on. STUN negotiates pipes n:n. TURN is closer to n:1.
I don't know you mean by this, but I think you're confused. I have implemented STUN, so I know how it works. AFAIK, TURN doesn't reveal an address/port any different from that revealed by STUN, and cannot, because its discovery feature is STUN. (Also, a typical home user has only one internet-facing address, not a dynamic one plus another one.)
Rather, TURN provides a STUN address/port discovery service and a data relay service. The relay is for cases where two peers wishing to connect are both behind difficult NAT, meaning there is no quick and reliable way for them to directly connect even when they have their STUN results. So instead of connecting directly, they communicate through the relay.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traversal_Using_Relays_around_...
STUN has mitigations now against being weaponized but it’s still a shit protocol. The fact that neither STUN nor TURN contain any way whatsoever to accomplish any kind of rendezvous without yet another signaling path boggles my mind given how easy it would have been.
Interesting. Can you expound on this a bit? How does ZeroTier do it?
I think we can align on WebRTC for realtime P2P gaming and enterprise networking and more, instead of IPs base solution as end-users will not need to figure out firewall issues and IPv4/IPv6 differents
It's just something so heartwarming of multiple people coming together to describe their symptoms, workarounds and theories of what could be causing it.
Don’t blame Github for getting spammed whenever an issue reaches the front page.
> when the platform was for professionals
Maybe they need a few average devs there to spend time sweeping up behind the paragons that are pushing the envelope into these features existing at all.
Perhaps some of this is contracted, similar to the Linux compat and drivers, but it's still impressive to me, compared to the orgs like Spotify, order of magnitude larger with barely any features at all. (I understand there's legal, huge backend, and I didn't see many bugs over time, but still)
Why did you leave this part of title out? For clicks?
SDR is a relay network, and encrypted, so like onionrouting etc.
its well known malicious actors can abuse it by publishing a p2p game and running coms over SDR via that game...
you can imagine that people want to inspect this traffic in these regions..
`Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other middle east countries`
Looks like they tracked it to a steam update in March, and there's a workaround for at lest 3 games that involves all players copying steamwebrtc.dll to the game's ./binaries folder.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/multiplayer/stea...
I wish they offered remote; I'd happily work there doing those sorts of unglamorous bug fixes. High-reliability engineering is my jam.
In fact, the flat org allows a random person to work on a niche bug management doesn’t seem to care about, which wouldn’t be possible if you had a boss breathing down your neck.
I kind of hope at least they'll fix such issues permanently before the steam machine release.
I shop on GOG.
I agree. But if there is a chance to not immediately draw in the wrong crowd... I prefer if people take it.
Other than relaying and STUN-like IP info reflection, they're dumb and do very little. They can't see your traffic or other information or even what virtual networks you're on.
Once both sides learn their external info, they communicate via the root to arrange P2P rendezvous. If both have IPv6 they use that, but still do a hole punch due to stateful firewalls. But with V6 it works almost 100% of the time. If one or both have V4, they do more cumbersome V4 hole punch maneuvers.
Our next-gen product, which is still in pre-release and has been shown only to some enterprise customers, is called ZeroTier Quantum. It's called that cause it's built on PQC (pqNoise to be exact) but it's also a full-scale reengineering of the whole system. But it still uses very similar techniques. Everything is in-band. No STUN, TURN, or even DNS dependencies.
I actually wouldn't blame the web roots. Battle.net is also a CEF based launcher and it feels so much more snappy compared to Steam. For some reason Steam just feels really slow.
"Steam is bad because it has few employees."
"Steam can afford more employees."
"Adding more employees would make Steam worse."
Good talk.
Webrtc traffic is encrypted as it travels through the TURN servers, isn't it? Sure, you get some which-ip-contacted-which-using-what-service metadata, but any active middleman able to mess with STUN traffic already has that.
It could just be that someone's fucked up a setting somewhere. I mean, the reason WebRTC has loads of options for 'interactive connectivity establishment' is because it's common to see users behind NAT, users whose NAT cant be traversed with STUN, IPv6 being broken, UDP getting blocked, TCP ports other than port 443 getting blocked, etc etc.
If a country's ISPs use CGNAT to avoid giving users precious IPv4 addresses, and world events made the ISPs turn the security settings up to 11, STUN just stops working.