Testing Steam Link

It is my summer vacation period now, and during a rainy week, it would be nice to play also some PC games – either alone, or together as a social experience, if a game from a suitable genre is available. To bring the PC experience from my “media cave” to the living room, I installed Steam Link, a small device that is designed for remotely streaming and accessing the PC games, running on the gaming desktop PC (which is equipped with a powerful graphics card) in the basement, from the living room large-screen tv.

The idea is pretty plug-and-play style simple, but it actually took over an hour of troubleshooting to get the system setup right. Initially, there was no image in the television screen, apart from the blue Link boot symbol, and the trick that finally solved this issue was to change the HDMI cable to another one – the Link box appears to be a bit picky on those. Then, my “Xbox One Controller with the Wireless Adapter” did not work with Steam Link (it works fine with the PC), but my old PS3 Dualshock controllers appeared to work just fine, both in wired and wireless modes. Finally, there was an issue with “Dota 2”, the game I first tested, where the game got stuck with every dialog box, and did not accept any input from either the gamepad or from mouse/keyboard (one can connect also Bluetooth devices to the Steam Link) – I had to run downstairs to access the game locally from the PC to get over it (I wonder what was behind that one). Oh yes, and finally it appeared that there was no game sound in the living room television, from any game running in the Steam Link. This could also be fixed by going downstairs, and changing manually the Windows 10 playback device to be the living room television set – the Steam software appears to get confused, and automatic configuration will end up muting and/or playing sounds via wrong audio devices.

But after those ones, we got some nice, all-family gameplay action with the “Jones on Fire” PC version. And there are now several more games downloading from the Steam store, so developing and selling – rather cheaply – the Steam Link box appears to be a smart move from Valve. Now, if only the multiple components and services in a typical h0me network would play together a bit more reliably, and the support for wireless game controllers (such as the wireless Xbox One version) would be better, this would be an excellent setup.