Valve's Steam streaming service lets you play games on the toilet Games maker Valve has launched Steam In-Home Streaming, a new service that allows Steam subscribers to view and play games that are running on their primary PCs on devices located anywhere in their homes. "When you log into Steam on two computers on the same network, they automatically connect, allowing you to remotely install …
Not to mention actually workable rather, than pie-in-the-sky cloud-rendered gaming.
Latency-sensitive games will still be out, but there's a whole lot of other things which will be fine.
I wonder if Valve might think of applying the tech to more business-oriented applications once the kinks have been ironed out. If it can do games, it should handle LibreOffice rather easily. If we get full-duplex sound you're edging towards an RDP replacement. Add SteamOS and you might have a small-biz server in a box. Virtualise a windows workstation to add a mainstream accounts package...
The year of the linux desktop! :p
Only issue I've had when running this is one of resolution.
My laptop is considerably older and smaller than my desktop monitor yet the streaming keeps settings from your host computer. This ends up giving me 1920x1080 on a screen generally built for 1366x768, resulting in quite a bit of eye strain. It's easy enough to change the resolution to fit my laptop but that change is remembered on the host machine, resulting in a fair bit of resolution swapping on occasions where I computer swap a lot.
Past that, I've had a small warning in the bottom left telling me of slow decoding but damned if I could feel the difference in a 4X game.
SteamOS is just Linux pre-installed with the Steam client. It's a useful project for a number of reasons, but in terms of Steam functionality there is nothing you don't get from simply installing the steam client on a regular Linux machine. Linux (including SteamOS), fair enough..
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It's a bit more than that, but essentially you're correct.
What you get with SteamOS is effectively a gaming appliance, without all the extra gubbins you don't need, and without having to build it yourself from scratch.
I for one am perfectly happy with Steam running atop Ubuntu - but I can see the appeal of a tweeked gaming OS that needs no user-end tweeking and gets relevant, approved updates (Ie the repo GPU drivers don't break your custom X config etc)
I guess they just want to market their SteamBox/Piston/whatever machines as a console instead of a PC. Saying that your Steam-games-playing-device runs SteamOS is akin to saying that your device is not a PC because it doesn't use PC-centric OSes.
On the other hand, you can also install SteamOS onto desktop PCs, so long as it has an x86-64 CPU and uses the UEFI firmware...
That's the nice thing. Don't want to buy a new gaming rig? Got a 680Ti that's still capable of throwing enough polygons, with enough shading at enough frames, but have a nice laptop which means you don't need all the Windows (or linux) potential crash-vectors and malware threats (flash etc)? Are the games you play on SteamOS?
Fine. Grab a (free) SteamOS installer and throw it on that box, and boom, you have one decent little gaming appliance.
Niche market for sure, but it's a market - and it's not the only one.
Of course, we still have the chicken/egg issue - will developers write AAA games for it (Gabe has been pushing for this) to get the gamers in, or will AAA developers wait for market penetration before writing games for it?
If it's the latter, it's FUBAR before it starts. If it's the former, then it may well have a bright future for a substantial minority of gamers.
I tried a few games on my Mac mini via ethernet and they were fine. There was a little mouse lag but switching to my Xbox 360 controller masked that quite well. Some fast games will put you at a disadvantage but I can now play Train Simulator on my Mac. How far we have come.....
Seriously though, I even fired up my retina MBP over wifi and was able to play most games pretty well. There was obvious video degradation when playing Just Cause 2 but if I dropped the resolution that could be handled. Again, lag was a bit of a problem but I suspect my slow network wasn't helping things.
All in all though, a wired dedicated SteamBox able to access games from my Windows box would be of more value to me than a PS4 or XboxOne simply because I already have a large game selection and many many more for next to no money.
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