Valve Updates GameNetworkingSockets After Nearly Four Year Hiatus
Back in 2018, Valve open-sourced their Steam networking sockets library as a basic network transport layer for games
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Valve Updates GameNetworkingSockets After Nearly Four Year Hiatus Written by Michael Larabel in Valve on 28 April 2026 at 08:22 PM EDT. Add A Comment Back in 2018, Valve open-sourced their Steam networking sockets library as a basic network transport layer for games. This library is used by games from Counter-Strike to Dota 2 and since its public open-source drop has been picked up elsewhere. Finally after going nearly four years without a new version, GameNetworkingSockets v1.5 dropped today. GameNetworkingSockets serves reliable and unreliable message types and provides a connection-oriented API for games/engines that is message-oriented like UDP. GameNetworkingSockets supports IPv6, peer-to-peer networking, encryption, and much more.
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