The war for the living room, as pundits in thick-rimmed specs are so fond of calling it, is fought with a blitzkrieg of features; manufacturers and platform holders do battle over who can fit the most functionality into the smallest box possible. As we’ve already discovered, that’s a risky approach indeed, and it’s refreshing to unbox a device with a singular purpose. Steam Link streams games from a PC running Steam on a local network. And that’s it.
It does so marvellously. It’s tempting to see the option to show debug information in the bottom-left corner of the screen as a symbol of how confident Valve is in Steam Link’s capabilities – and the readout showing one-millisecond stream ping times and rock-solid framerates would give it every reason to be. Instead it’s more likely that Valve just really likes looking at that sort of thing, and expects its users to have the same appetite. It’s a reasonable assumption. When streaming games, whether from a remote or local server, we find ourselves looking for faults first and playing a game second. With Steam Link we can quickly shift our gaze to the corner of the screen, reassure ourselves that all is functioning as it should, and get back to business.
The advantage Steam Link holds over Shield TV’s GameStream is, first, in compatibility: while Nvidia’s list is small and hand-picked, Valve’s solution supports every single thing in your Steam library. That doesn’t just mean games you’ve bought through Steam itself, either: simply add a shortcut to an external program in Steam, and you can boot it over the network. And while Steam Link automatically switches the remote client to the TV-friendly Big Picture Mode, you can revert to the desktop version with a few button presses, giving you full control over, and access to everything on, your PC.
That’s a necessary inclusion, because there are a few wrinkles – this is a seamless streaming service, but there are times when the quirks of Windows get in the way. One User Account Control popup caused a stream to drop entirely, forcing us to scurry upstairs to the desktop PC to dismiss it. And Valve’s desire to make everything fit the living-room screen means that 600-pixel-width launcher menus are blown up to full size. Many of them only respond to mouse input, too, so if you’re playing with a console controller you’ll need to keep a wireless mouse to hand.
But only if you’re buying Steam Link on its own, and chances are you won’t. In the UK, Game has the exclusive rights to Steam Link – and as anyone who’s ever tried to buy new hardware from the nation’s biggest high-street retailer will know too well, it’s a company rather fond of only selling hot new gear through bundles. So it proves here, but it’s well worth it: £100 gets you a Link, £20 in Steam Wallet funds and, arguably the highlight of the whole package, a Steam Controller. Even now, weeks after playing this way, our years-old muscle memory is struggling to make the adjustment to Valve’s vision of the next generation of couch control, but it’s already clear that the company’s effort to make a controller that bridges the decades-old divide between sticks-and-buttons and mouse-and-keyboard controls has been a success.
The Steam Controller’s principal innovation is a pair of clickable touchpads that dominate the face of the device, with haptic feedback replicating the sensation of a mouse or scroll wheel moving at speed. By default the left touchpad mimics a D-pad and the right plays the role of a mouse pointer, but every input on the controller can be userdefined, and subsequently shared online. Load up a game, press the Steam button to call up the Big Picture Mode overlay, and you can either customise the control scheme and save it for future use, or search a database of those made by others, including, in many cases, the developers themselves. This is classic Valve – make something cool and let the community work out the finer details – but there’s no frustration to be had in this instance at the company’s habit of throwing unfinished ideas into the wild.
There are teething problems, of course. Muscle memory will take some time to adjust to how low down, and close to the centre of the controller, the face buttons are. And while developers have been quick to embrace the Steam Controller with their own suggested configurations, there’s a significant difference between simply making a game controllable from a greater distance than it was originally designed for and actually making it playable. Colossal Order’s custom config for Cities: Skylines works beautifully, but the developer hasn’t thought to scale up the UI for pairs of eyes situated ten feet away rather than 24 inches. Until that’s addressed, the city of New Edgeville – work on which began with so much grand ambition – will forever remain a single, unzoned coastal road.
Like Nvidia, Valve has a vested interest in making its new hardware a success, since it’s a key part of the company’s long-anticipated assault on the living room with Steam Machines. Yet while its PC hardware effort is a confused tangle of partner manufacturers, unappealing industrial design and wildly fluctuating specs and price points, Steam Link benefits greatly from that narrow, singular focus. Since it requires a beefy gaming PC to function, it may have the biggest barrier to entry of any of he new wave of streaming boxes, but it’s also the cheapest, the most effective and, thanks to the Steam Controller, the most innovative of the lot.