If only there were some way to play all the games we have on our high-powered games PCs that we have hidden away in our bedroom/office/den on our TV in the lounge, we’d never need to buy a console again. After all, console games are expensive, they have terrible controls and the multiplayer modes consist of being repeatedly smacked down by pre-pubescent Americans.
If only.
Wait. What’s this?
Valve is bringing in-home game streaming to everyone today, thanks to an update in to its Steam software that allows you to run a game on one PC and see and control it on another.
The streaming feature allows you to play certain Steam games over the same WiFi network on another machine allowing your big, hulking, liquid cooled gaming rig to do all of the heavy lifting and stream the game to your Ultrabook in another room. It’s still in beta testing – you need to go to Steam>Settings>Account to enable it – and the host PC has to be running Windows, but it’s potentially a massive win for Valve.
It’s something we have already seen from the likes of Sony with the ability to play your PlayStation 4 using a PS Vita in the same local network. The PS4 does all of the hard lifting but accepts its inputs from the PS Vita’s controls and streams the images to the Vita’s display instead of to a TV. It’s not just consoles that can use this type of video streaming either, NVIDIA’s Shield handheld console can stream games from a computer running a dedicated NVIDIA graphics card as well.
The advantage that Steam will have is in the fact that the service is operating system agnostic. Games from a Windows machine running Steam can be streamed to a Linux or Mac machine and vice versa. In fact, considering Valve’s push into the living room with the upcoming, Linux powered, SteamBox consoles this could be the killer feature that turns the tide for the nascent player. While a noisy but infinitely more powerful gaming rig churns away making high frame rate, anti-aliased graphical goodness in another room, a small quiet SteamBox is being used in the living room on a big screen to deliver the entertainment.
Advantage: Valve.
