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Lobbies

The Lobbies subsystem provides access to Steam matchmaking lobbies, allowing players to create, join, search, and manage peer-to-peer lobby sessions.

This subsystem is focused on lobby discovery, membership management, and metadata exchange, and is intended to be used as a lightweight coordination layer on top of your own networking or session logic.

Capabilities

  • Create Steam lobbies with custom visibility and member limits.
  • Join existing lobbies by ID.
  • Search for available lobbies using filter parameters.
  • Leave the current lobby.
  • Query lobby state, ownership, and membership information.
  • Set and retrieve custom key-value data for lobbies and lobby members.
  • Access the list of lobby members and their associated data.
  • Subscribe to lobby lifecycle and membership events.

Important Notes

  • Steam lobbies do not provide networking or server authority by themselves.
  • This subsystem does not implement gameplay sessions, replication, or transport logic.
  • Lobby data is shared as key-value pairs and is limited in size by Steam.
  • Ownership and membership events are driven by Steam callbacks and may arrive asynchronously.
  • Games are responsible for defining how lobby data is interpreted and used.