Steam In-Home Streaming First Impressions

The best way to explain Steam’s in-home streaming is to quote Valve directly:

Any two computers in a home can be used to stream a gameplay session and this can enable playing games on systems that would not traditionally be able to run those games. For example, a Windows only game could be streamed from a Windows PC to a Steam Machine running Linux in the living room. A graphically intensive game could be streamed from a beefy gaming rig in the office to your low powered laptop that you are using in bed. You could even start a game on one computer and move to a more comfortable location and continue playing it there.

In-Home Streaming is in beta right now, so I decided to test it out using my roommate’s computer. We’re both running Windows, but his computer is significantly less powerful: he has an i5–3330S with 8GB RAM, and I have an i5–3570K, a GTX 670, and 16GB RAM.

The first step was to make sure both computers are using the beta version of Steam (they already were.) Then I logged into both computers using the same Steam account. Both computers popped up with a message saying that they were ready for in-home streaming. I decided to test it out with games that a) were too graphically intense for Declan’s computer, and b) were only installed on my computer.

First up, I tried Batman: Arkham City. It looked really good and I didn’t detect any lag. However, I quickly remembered that I had gliding and grapple hooking set to my mouse’s thumb buttons. Since Declan’s mouse doesn’t have those I couldn’t move around very quickly or gracefully.

Next I tried out Borderlands 2, and I took a quick video of it. Naturally, that means that I was playing one-handed, so again it wasn’t graceful. It’s worth noting that although both computers display the game on their screens, only the computer that is receiving the stream outputs the audio.

So there you have it, Steam in-home streaming works as advertised! Of course, it’s only useful to those of us with multiple computers in their house, and I have no idea how well it will work on different routers. I think it would be a very good move for some company to come out with a Steam Machine as small and cheap as possible, with the intention of taking advantage of in-home streaming. It would be like the Chromecast of gaming, and we know how well the Chromecast sold.