SteamDB, the site that leaked the existence of the Steam Summer sale dates for 2018 yesterday, have also revealed that a Steam Link and Steam Video app will be heading to mobile devices later this year. The first one to release, the Steam Link app, will allow gamers to stream their Steam library to any Android or iOS device capable of running the app. There will be support for the Steam Controller, and standard MFI controllers on both platforms. It's recommended that you use either a 5Ghz wireless connection, or a wired connection. This app will launch in full on May 21st. Many gamers may be familiar with Moonlight, a mobile app that allows players to stream their games, however, it is only available to those who have newer types of Nvidia graphics card, while the Steam Link app will work regardless of your PC's hardware.

Afterwards, slated for a Summer 2018 release, is the Steam Video app, which will let users download or stream videos purchased through Steam to their mobile platforms.

Source

 

[deinonychus71]

Interesting... Gamevice says thank you.

 

[leon315]

A QUESTION FOR steam links: do i have to keep my pc turned on to stream games to my android phone?

Never used Steam link...

 

[Kioku]

A QUESTION FOR steam links: do i have to keep my pc turned on to stream games to my android phone?

Never used Steam link...

Yes.. Otherwise you've got nothing to stream from

 

[SimplyFedorable]

A QUESTION FOR steam links: do i have to keep my pc turned on to stream games to my android phone?

Never used Steam link...

Yeah, the games run on your pc, and it just gets streamed to your phone.

 

[LightyKD]

Interesting. I hope that some form of this comes to Windows mobile devices. I'll be able to play my higher end games from my tablet!

 

[orangy57]

lord I've been waiting for a steam link app for so long. All these other streaming apps don't really seem to do it like steam link did across my computer's.

 

[HaloEliteLegend]

Daaaang that's gonna be super nice! Looking forward to playing games in bed more easily.

 

[Nomelas]

time to abandon nvidia and go back to AMD gpus

 

[DarthDub]

Watch all the free videos I got. Nice!

 

[Qtis]

Now if only you could install games from steam on the phone. Games with mobile ports would be obviously the first step, but let's see..

 

[LightyKD]

Interesting. I hope that some form of this comes to Windows mobile devices. I'll be able to play my higher end games from my tablet!

Now that I know that this app will not be for out of house use, I take back my words. We already have the current version of Steam Link for PC to PC gaming which works well on my tab. So much for hoping that Valve would have an out of house solution

 

[RedoLane]

Why purchase videos on Steam when you can watch everything on YouTube? I really don't get that logic :V

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Awesome. I do use in-home streaming so will definitely give the Steam Link app a try. I just need to get one of those phone holders for my NES30 Pro to make it more convenient.

Now that I know that this app will not be for out of house use, I take back my words. We already have the current version of Steam Link for PC to PC gaming which works well on my tab. So much for hoping that Valve would have an out of house solution

It's not officially supported, but you can connect to your home network through a VPN and stream games just like you would at home. I tried it once using a VPN set up on my router (was very easy to set up on my ASUS router by the way) and it was almost as good as streaming locally. If you're far away from home latency will be higher though.

Steam in-home streaming can use up to 30mbps, but I've never seen it use more than around 15 when streaming locally on the highest bandwidth setting. You want a reasonably fast upload though for the best quality, and you don't want it using up your entire upload speed since that means any other device on your home network, or some software running on your PC could suddenly decide to take up some of the bandwidth which can cause lag spikes and stuttering. So best to set Steam's bandwidth setting to your home internet upload speed minus about 5mbps, and close down anything you don't need running so there's less chance of that happening.
And the download speed of your current connection needs to be matched to that bandwidth setting or higher or you'll likely have video glitching, freezing and stuttering.
But with all that taken into account it does work surprisingly well. Input lag wasn't much worse than at home and the video quality was equal.

 

[Xzi]

Why yes I will take my entire Steam library on my phone for free, thank you very much. Kinda invalidates much of my need to mod Switch TBH, since I can use all the same controllers. This is why Valve is and has always been awesome.

 

[OllieD]

Hopefully these releases will bring an overhaul of the Steam Streaming system.
Steam Link's work terribly over LAN connections nevermind anything else.

Other streaming services like Parsec, Rainway, Remotr to name a few all seem to outperform Steam Link massively and work quite well over LAN and WiFi.

Parsec seem to be willing to licence out their Streaming Tech so maybe Steam should make a deal?

time to abandon nvidia and go back to AMD gpus

I have no idea why you would come to that conclusion when AMD hardware is possibly the worst choice when you are considering remote game streaming.

Parsec have written 2 recent articles about how the video encoding on recent AMD GPU's is roughly 3x slower than any recent NVIDIA GPU.

https://blog.parsecgaming.com/new-n...rds-on-h-264-compression-latency-d32784464b94

https://blog.parsecgaming.com/nvidi...latency-in-parsec-co-op-sessions-713b9e1e048a

 

[cracker]

Nice. I already have a Shield Portable with Nvidia's game link but this will provide current, ongoing updates. I hope they include an auto-pause/-resume for dropped connections. So many Steam games to play but I end up doing programming or "file maintenance" when I'm at my desktop.

 

[Xzi]

Apple has rejected the Steam Link app from their store over 'business conflicts.' I presume this means they wanted a cut of every Steam sale via iOS and Valve wouldn't give it to them.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/24/...-valve-steam-link-app-store-ios-game-steaming

 

[Originality]

It’s not about getting a cut since Steam Link is simply a streaming service. It’s most likely the fact that it worked so well that people would probably stop buying apps from the store and simply play their Steam games instead.

Edit, maybe they didn’t want quality games on their platform and are happy with the unfiltered garbage games that plague the mobile market. Then again, Steam has plenty of garbage of its own clogging up the marketplace.