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Comment by JoeBOFH | Hacker News Reader

I love GOG and buy a lot of games through them, but at the same time one of the things Steam provides is very easy and simple online coop support. So if I ever intend to play with others I go with Steam. I don’t see an easy way around that.

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I think this is cause most developers just end up using steam's APIs for these things and since steam will be most of their sales they don't bother. I have seen games using epic's solution in their steam distribution.

i do wonder how hard it would be to integrate multiple of these APIs so that the end user could invite anyone from any platform, though i imagine you'll still need some sort of middle man / lobby server...

Either way, I'm not a fan of having to generate lobby codes every time I want to play baldurs gate 3 with my friends who have it on steam

The API is pretty straightforward. It's mostly about resolving SteamIDs and talking to the matchmaking server. Last time I used it, once you have all the player and server data, you pretty much just send UPD packets through another Steam API call. Though I think you use SteamIDs instead of IP addresses.

Unless you've gone super deep into the Steam API, it shouldn't be too hard to plug in a different framework.

We need someone to write a compatibility layer for those APIs, so it can be used across various "multiplayer-providers" and distribution platforms. Call it Sroton. Or maybe someone could email Gabe and ask if he could just straight up open source it and let others implement it too.

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