Steam's 'Remote Play' feature lets you access your game library away from home

Polycount

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As game streaming services continue to make waves in the tech industry, many companies are starting to lean into the concept more heavily. Steam, for example, has just decided to overhaul its "In-Home Streaming" service, which allowed you to stream games from your main PC to other devices in your house.

Now, the service has been rebranded to "Steam Remote Play," and it's "experimentally" available to the general public starting today. Whereas before you were limited to streaming your games from your PC to other devices in your home on the same network, that restriction has been lifted now.

As Valve puts it, your Steam clients can now stream games to each other "wherever they are," as long as you have a decent network connection on both sides (the company didn't offer specifics) and are reasonably "close" to a Steam datacenter. However, even with those restrictions in mind, this is a pretty nice update for those who tend to travel frequently.

...your Steam clients can now stream games to each other "wherever they are," as long as you have a decent network connection on both sides...

It should be pointed out that Steam Remote Play is not the same thing as Google's Stadia cloud gaming service. Your host system, and the machine you'll be streaming to both need to be switched on and paired. Additionally, you can only play games you actually own and have installed on your host system; you aren't playing the games from Valve's servers.

To try out Remote Play, all you'll need to do is log into your Steam account from a non-primary computer and open up the "Remote Play" settings menu. You'll be given an option to add and pair the device with your main machine. There are also "Client options" that let you tweak things like resolution and audio quality.

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Who cares?

something that grinds my gears:

Steam provides the SteamLink App for Rasberry Pi which is a board with the Broadcom closed source chipset. There are SO MANY OTHER SBCs THAT KICK THE SNOT OUT OF THE RASPBERRY PI! There are ones now that are well under 100 bucks that can do 4k!

They need to unlock the ability to use more devices rather than cater the way they do with devices like the Crapberry Pi and ShieldTV.
 
Who cares?

something that grinds my gears:

Steam provides the SteamLink App for Rasberry Pi which is a board with the Broadcom closed source chipset. There are SO MANY OTHER SBCs THAT KICK THE SNOT OUT OF THE RASPBERRY PI! There are ones now that are well under 100 bucks that can do 4k!

They need to unlock the ability to use more devices rather than cater the way they do with devices like the Crapberry Pi and ShieldTV.

Honestly, other than retropie gaming, and projects for learning, prototyping, or robotics what use is there, Asus made a nice board, but it's barely supported because it's a few dollars more.
 
Hmm think if people make a voluntary community based streaming service that allows people to use your computer\console to stream their games for free. If security is a concern it could be limited to family and friends.

p.s. or even a bit coin mining type gaming stream where the people who own the hardware get a little compensation, that way you could use whatever platform you already own games on, I guess it isn't that much different from remote tech support?
 
My Nvidia Shield is great for playing PC games from my sofa. If this would allow me to play PC games from my phone, I'd be interested. My home internet (1.5Gb down/1Gb up/unlimited) would be more than capable, now if only I could get unlimited data on my phone.
 
Is there something I'm missing about owning, say a $700-1000 i5-8300H GTX1060 gaming laptop which solves this remote gaming thing with the right solution: low-latency local gaming.
 
Is there something I'm missing about owning, say a $700-1000 i5-8300H GTX1060 gaming laptop which solves this remote gaming thing with the right solution: low-latency local gaming.

That's fine for some things, but laptop gaming mostly sucks compared to even my modest PC (i5-8400, GTX 1070Ti). If I can say go to a hotel somewhere for work and stream games to my hotel room from my PC, it's hard to imagine it not being better.
 
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