Steam Remote Play experiments with streaming outside the home

The games industry has been making a big push towards streaming this year. Well, one of the long-standing options just received a big update. Steam’s In-Home Streaming feature has allowed you to stream games from your PC to other devices on your LAN with Steam or the Steam Link app installed. With today’s patch, Valve has renamed the feature to “Steam Remote Play,” and it “experimentally” allows you to stream games from your PC to any of those devices outside your home.

Steam Remote Play extends your streaming outside the home.

What exactly is “good”?

This already sounds like a fantastic new feature for this device. I mean, who doesn’t want more options on where and how they can stream their favorite games? But, of course, there are conditions. The Remote Play update announcement notes that two very important qualifications apply:

• A “good network connection” is required on both sides
• Both devices are close to a Steam datacenter

Unfortunately, Valve doesn’t explain or even suggest what exactly they mean by a “good network connection”. As such, users will have to perfom their own experiments to see where the new feature might work for them.

I am a daily user of the in-home streaming feature, which has proven solid for me on a 5 GHz LAN connection. So, you’d think I should be an ideal user to test Remote Play. However, I’m also stuck with an asymmetric connection, so I don’t have high hopes.

Let’s figure it out together

If you try out the new Steam Remote Play feature for yourself, make sure to head down to the comments section! We’d like to hear what kind of connections you are gaming on and what your experience has been. Together, we can all gain a better understanding of what exactly a “good” connection is.