June 6, 2026
Steam heat, lag chaos
Valve P2P networking broken for more than 2 months
Players say Steam matches turned into a lag nightmare — and the comments are spiraling
TLDR: Players in Israel say Steam-based PC matches have been badly delayed for over two months, even though the same games run smoothly on PlayStation. In the comments, some call it a growing worldwide mess, others trade bizarre homebrew fixes, and a few insist everything works fine — turning the thread into equal parts bug hunt and drama pit.
What started as a very specific player pain in Israel has now turned into a full-on comment-section detective show. Gamers say that since mid-March, person-to-person matches in Steam-powered games have felt wildly off: Israeli players report painful delay when playing each other on PC, yet somehow get smooth, almost instant matches when switching to PlayStation 5 cross-play. That contrast is what really lit the fuse — because to players, it screams "this isn’t our internet, something broke".
And the community? Oh, they are deep in the rabbit hole. One commenter said the issue may have started in Israel and nearby countries, but now "seems to be a worldwide problem," instantly escalating the mood from local bug to possible global mess. Others jumped in with DIY fixes, including a weirdly specific workaround involving copying a file into a game folder — the kind of cursed fix that makes players feel like unpaid repair staff. At the same time, not everyone agrees on how big the disaster really is: one commenter from China casually reported things worked fine for them, adding that classic internet-drama ingredient, the contradiction.
There was even a wholesome nerd corner, with one user calling bug-report threads "heartwarming" because strangers band together to compare symptoms and trade theories. So yes, the vibes are a mix of frustration, crowd-sourced sleuthing, and gallows humor: part support group, part conspiracy board, part tech support séance.
Key Points
- •The article claims a systemic latency issue has affected Steam Networking P2P games since around 13 March.
- •In Street Fighter 6, the author reports about 120 ms ping for Israeli player versus Israeli player on PC-to-PC connections.
- •The same article reports lower latency of 60-80 ms when Israeli players connect to European players in Street Fighter 6.
- •Cross-play testing in Street Fighter 6 reportedly showed 5-10 ms ping for PC-to-PS5 matches.
- •The author says multiple Israeli players across several ISPs are affected, while non-Steam-Networking P2P games such as Tekken 8 do not show the problem.