Valve P2P networking broken for more than 2 months
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Valve's P2P networking has been broken for over two months in Israel, China, and other regions, forcing games to use high-latency relay servers.
Since March 13, 2026, players in Israel report P2P connections in Steam-based games like Street Fighter 6 experiencing 120ms latency instead of typical 60-80ms with European players. Cross-platform play (PC to PS5) shows 5-10ms latency, ruling out ISP issues. Chinese players report similar problems in games like Warhammer: Vermintide 2 and Deep Rock Galactic, where direct P2P connections fail to establish despite "Share IP Address" being enabled, forcing reliance on Steam's SDR relay service. A Valve developer acknowledged the issue on April 24 and said they would coordinate with partners to investigate why the setting isn't being honored. Users discovered a workaround: copying older steamwebrtc.dll files to game binaries restores P2P connectivity.
What commenters are saying
The thread's dominant observation is that STUN (used for P2P link establishment) has failed, and manual substitution of older WebRTC DLLs works around the issue. Commenters noted the problem is geographically specific to regions without strong internet freedom, raising speculation about government policy affecting P2P. Discussion also surfaced Valve's broader engineering oddities: talented senior engineers but flawed APIs and infrastructure, plus a flat org structure that may leave unsexy bugs unfixed. One commenter reported the issue extends to Deep Rock Galactic and mentioned a Street Fighter 6 mod requiring both players to install it.