If you have a powerful gaming PC hidden away in one corner of your house, but want to knock out a quick game of Crysis or Dark Souls II on your laptop or home-theatre PC, you’re officially in luck. Valve has made its In-Home Streaming service available to any Steam customer.
Steam In-Home Streaming is a simple enough concept — when you have two computers sitting on the same network, log into Steam on both computers, and they’re automagically linked; after that, you can remotely install, launch and play games from your laptop (or any remote PC on that network) as if you were sitting in front of your gutsy gaming rig.
All the processing is done on the more powerful PC, and not only Windows PCs are supported — since you can run Steam on a Mac OS X PC, for example, you can stream games from your Windows gaming machine to your svelte MacBook Air. It’s highly dependent on the quality of your home network, so don’t expect dodgy 802.11g Wi-Fi to work, but if you have a solid wired network or some high-speed 802.11ac, you should be set.
I’m keen to give In-Home Streaming a try; my gaming PC is more than powerful enough to keep up with today’s blockbuster games, but more often than not I’m camped out in front of the TV instead. It’d be nice to play a game or two without being bothered by installing games and updating drivers. [Steam]