Valve “stealthily” releases remote play beta for steam.
So a few days ago from this writing, I came across an article that mentioned Steam Remote Play. I originally chalked it up as the Steam Link in network/ in-house sessions offered by the Steam PC gaming platform, still in beta. I’ve been testing this feature out on my various devices (phone and Firestick). I found it quite enjoyable. BUT HOLD ON... that’s not what this is!
Per the very informative article via Kitguru.net this Steam Link beta has now been opened to remote stream to Samsung Tvs AND outside your home network!
You have to be close to a data center owned by Valve (unfortunately I have no source to tell where these are located). I not knowing if I fit into this category, I still wanted to try out. I made the necessary updates per the phone app, which then updated Steam on my PC and KABOOM. Afterwards, from 2 .5 miles away from my home, I was able to connect remotely and play games.
The application said I had a “slow” 5 MBPS connection. With that, the touch screen controls were spot on with hardly any lag noticed (I’m not a lag spot guru... I guess, nonetheless). However, with my bluetooth iPega PG-9087 controller the lag was noticable, but not horrible.
In it’s current state, the process appears to struggle at first working with peripheals blue toothed to your device, when out of network. You have to wait several minutes for everything to “sync” and work in a playable state. I was however playing a game not optimized for Steam’s big picture mode Borderlands 1). Big picture mode is whats used to conduct the streaming from your original steam installed hardware. In addition, keep in mind this is still in beta.
That said, we’ve had Stadia via Project Stream put something in our hands via streaming and now Valve with Steam Link. Microsoft has announced a beta would be active in October 2019. We are aware of no details on scope at this time.
