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Valve In-Home Game Streaming Supports Windows, OS X & Linux
MojoKid (1002251) writes "Valve has today pushed out a new update to its Steam client on all three of the major OSes that finally takes In-home Game-Streaming out of beta. Similar to NVIDIA's GameStream, which streams native gameplay from a GeForce-equipped PC to the NVIDIA SHIELD, Valve's solution lets you stream from one PC to another, regardless of which OS it's running. What this means is you could have a SteamOS-based PC in your living-room, which is of course Linux-based, and stream games from your Windows PC in another room which ordinarily would never run under Linux. Likewise, you could stream a game from a Windows PC to an OS X machine, or vice versa."
"Likewise, you could stream a game from a Windows PC to an OS X machine, or vice versa."
Unfortunately, the vice versa part isn't quite there yet, only Windows PCs can be the host OS at the moment. Valve do intend to patch in host functionality on Linux and OS X eventually though.
No AmigaOS support!?
They're shooting themselves in the foot!
It's pretty neat feature but ultimately it isn't going to help the grow the Linux and OS X game library
Not in the short term no. But it theoretically makes the linux based steambox a viable gaming platform, since windows gamers can add one next to the TV and play windows games on it.
If all goes according to valves plan, a few years down the road AAA windows game developers look up and realize there's millions of these linux steam boxes around, installed, hooked up to TVs with controllers... and suddenly realeasing a linux port doesn't seem all that risky.
Espeically if the steambox installed base is growing, while the dedicated windows gaming rigs are stagnating or declining... at some point releasing directly for steambox becomes a nobrainer.
that's the valve dream anyway. No idea if it will take off, but they've definitely put a lot of the right pieces out there to make it succeed.
Hardly. I tried using VNC and it's ilk to stream a simple game of Hearthstone and it was terrible. Then one day, I started playing a Steam game on my laptop. I thought the graphics were above average but didn't think much of it, and then I finally realized that I was playing a game hosted on my desktop PC when I remembered that I had never downloaded that particular game to my laptop. That's how transparent Valve made it. I didn't even know it was enabled and I was using it.