Steam P2P networking routes Israeli players through distant relays, breaking fighting games

Since mid-March, players in Israel report that any title built on Valve’s GameNetworkingSockets P2P stack pushes their connections to roughly 120ms latency, even against nearby opponents. Street Fighter 6 is the headline example: PC-to-PC matches between Israeli players run at 120ms, matches against European players land at a healthier 60-80ms, and PC-to-PS5 cross-play drops to 5-10ms because it bypasses the Steam relay network entirely. Tekken 8 and other P2P titles that don’t rely on Steam’s networking layer also work normally.

The affected community has ruled out the obvious local causes. Players span multiple Israeli ISPs, port forwarding has no effect, and ISP-side diagnostics show nothing wrong. Anecdotal reports from Egypt suggest the routing problem may extend across the wider Middle East, pointing to a regional issue with how Valve’s relay infrastructure selects or peers with edge points of presence rather than any client-side misconfiguration.

The report, filed against Valve’s open-source GameNetworkingSockets repository, highlights how dependent modern multiplayer titles have become on a small number of opaque relay networks. When the SDR backbone picks a poor path, neither game developers nor end users have meaningful recourse, and entire regional player bases get cut out of online play.