Since May 21st (or May 22nd in Malaysian Time), Steam’s In-Home Streaming has been graduated from beta status to now be available for all Steam users, who, presumably have updated their Steam client the past weekend. It was first rolled out as a beta last year and gamers would have to opt-in if they wanted to test it out.
Steam, as you may have already known, is Valve’s gaming distribution platform; think of it like iTunes for games. Its ‘In-Home Streaming’ service allows for a game installed on one PC, to be ‘streamed’ to another lower-powered computer, with just milliseconds of lag.
This came in a perfect time after Valve released the Steam client for Linux early last year, and subsequently announcing its three-pronged strategy — SteamOS, Steam Controller, and Steam Machine. The controller controls the machine that runs on SteamOS, which is Linux-based.
Steam games on Linux are still scarce, and as a stopgap measure, In-Home Streaming could help in the adoption of these Steam Machines. If you already have a powerful Windows gaming rig in your room, you could stream the game to your living room’s home theater PC that could be running on Windows, OS X, or even Ubuntu.
We did a quick run a few months ago and we can assure you that it works beautifully. It will blow your mind if you’re a gamer and see this thing work for the first time. Occasionally it’ll suffer dropped frames when the connection is unstable, but if both machines are on LAN, it could perform much better.
Sony’s PlayStation Now has a similar premise, except that it streams older games to the PS4 through the internet. This is far more complicated to pull off, hence it is still in a private beta and we won’t be expecting it to rollout to everyone anytime soon.
Unfortunately for now, In-Home Streaming only supports streaming games from Windows to OS X or Linux, and not the other way around, but hopefully that may change soon. More information on Steam In-Home Streaming here: http://store.steampowered.com/streaming.
Oh and by the way, Watch Dogs is out now; go get it.
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