Valve are expanding Steam Remote Play with defaults for popular games and a new API

Steam Remote Play (previously in-home streaming), the feature of Steam that allows you to stream a game from one PC to another device sure is handy and Valve are giving it a bit more of a push now.

While it's been a feature of Steam for quite some time, Valve never really seemed to do a whole lot with it. That was, until they renamed it and allowed you to stream to many more devices and outside the home too.

In a new blog post on Steam, Valve have announced they've given over 100 popular titles a default configuration. Valve said this has enabled them to learn more about how to build good touch controllers and they gave some examples. One of those is the Linux game Stardew Valley:

In this game the X button uses your farming tools. They're used rapidly and extremely often, so we enlarged the button to make it easy to press without looking. The arrow buttons cycle through your quick-bar items, and each of the sub menus have been given a helpful icon for quick access. The top center of the screen is sometimes used for dialog, so we moved the Steam button to the upper left. We also moved the keyboard button which is used for giving everything on your farm personalized names. The rest of the screen acts as a cursor trackpad for easily organizing the inventory.

After reading it, I decided to go and test it myself. I linked up my Android phone to Steam with the Steam Link application, went over the other side of the house and down a level to bring the wireless signal down and even then while playing Stardew Valley it's surprisingly brilliant. If I had a tablet with a slightly larger screen I could easily see myself playing more games like this from my Linux PC.

They also mention Ni No Kuni Wrath of the White Witch which makes full use of the Steam Input API, with controls that change based on different game sections which sounds very cool. I really hope to see more developers make great use of this.

See the full post about it on Steam. As for finding games that are properly setup for it, Steam also now has different categories to easily find them including:

• Remote Play on TV
• Remote Play on Tablet
• Remote Play on Phone

Thankfully, once you get properly into each of those lists you can narrow down by platform, while keeping it ticked for Remote Play features to easily find a Linux supported game with it. Quite a few show up too—nice!

For developers who want to make use of it and enable players to more easily play their games on other devices Valve have some documentation and a new API for device detection for games to adjust the resolution and UI as needed. Pretty sweet feature.

Steam Remote Play could be especially handy! No I'm not talking about doing a little farming while on the toilet (although the thought had crossed my mind…), perhaps more when you're sick and you don't want to sit at a desk with your PC? My laptop is pretty…pants (understatement) so streaming to my phone (or the laptop when it plays nice) might be something I will do more often if they keep doing handy updates like this to make the experience nicer overall.