The Ultimate Guide to In-Home Game Streaming

Game streaming! There are two kinds, didn't you know? The more popular one, by far, has to do with Twitch and other such services, and you hardly need us to start explaining that away. Today, however, we're more interested in the other kind, and if you're not that much into content creators and Internet personalities, we think you will be too.

More specifically, this is our ultimate guide to making the absolute most of the single most powerful gaming rig you have in your home. In most cases, that'll be your desktop PC, but this same approach can also be applied to virtually any gaming-capable PC, including reasonably powerful laptops and whatever else. Of course, we are talking about in-home streaming, which is easily one of the best things you could be using your home network for.

If you're a total newcomer to in-home game streaming (or Remote Play, if we're to use Valve's verbiage), then you're going to want to read through our intro section of the what, why, and how of it. If not, however, feel to skip down to the practical guide featured lower down. Good luck!

A Short Primer on In-Home Game Streaming

First things first, then: in-home game streaming of any type is basically just about transmitting your main rig's gameplay over to a secondary, receiver device. This device can be virtually anything by now, as we'll explain later on, and you could use a different, lower-end PC, a Steam Deck, or even your phone to play games the same way you do in your office. Neat stuff, really! It also means you don't need to stay stuck to your main gaming rig all day long, and you aren't forced to maintain several expensive gaming-capable PCs across your home.

Another huge boon for people modding their games is that, with in-home game streaming, you don't need to rebuild your entire installation on every single rig you want to play them on! Instead, your modded build of a game is simply streamed directly to the receiving device, and all of your saves, progression, and customization options are maintained across the board.

Of course, there are still caveats to keep in mind about all this. Firstly, there's going to be some small amount of added latency to the experience no matter what you do. If you do things right and follow our guide, this will be effectively imperceptible, but it's still worth being aware of it. Further, it should go without saying that you may need to do some changes to your network topology and the setup of your Intranet (yes, Intranet) to make things as seamless as they can be.

Everything you need for in-home game streaming

Of course, there is a baseline of technical requirements for us to parse through first. Here are all the things you'll need for a decent in-home game streaming experience:

• A host device, which is your main gaming PC.
• Solid local network coverage (i.e. hardwired backhauls, properly set-up access points and/or mesh nodes, and so on).
• A receiving device, which is virtually anything you want to play your games on.

On top of all of these things, you may or may not have further necessities depending on your specific network setup and use-case. As an example, here's how things went when I was setting up my own personal in-home game streaming setup!

My main gaming rig pulls double-duty as a office workhorse, and it's on the opposite end of the bedroom where I wanted to be able to play my games on both a low-end HTPC and my Steam Deck. This meant that I needed both hardwired Ethernet driven to the HTPC and solid WiFi coverage for the Deck, with the former easily solved by the purchase of a 50-meter CAT5E cable and a trip to the attic. The latter, however, was an issue since the router is located in the office, right next to the main gaming rig.

Solving this meant a minor investment in the overall capabilities of our home network: a few switches, a few hours' worth of cable organization, and a fancy new mesh network extender (with a hardwired CAT6 backhaul, at that) solved this problem real quick. However, I did need to spend some time planning out the upgrade to accommodate my use-case.

All of this is to say that if you don't get the performance/experience you're looking for right off the bat, you'll need to device if it's worth investing both money and time in working out what the issue is. In my case, it worked out phenomenally well, and I do recommend it.

Aside from networking qualms, note that your rig's specifics may also need some elbow grease. For example, the aforementioned office/gaming PC is equipped with two monitors, one of which is a non-standard 21:9, and the other is a regular 16:9... that's vertically oriented. Using these as a baseline for game streaming over to my bog-standard 16:9 HTPC TV or the Steam Deck was a no-go, and you need a GPU output for streaming to work, so simply turning them off wasn't an option either. This problem was solved by a simple dummy DisplayPort plug that emulates a 16:9 display at whatever resolution I choose, and a handy little CMD executable that turns my office displays off and on, depending on whether I want to stream games to my other devices, or do some actual work.

None of this may apply to your specific setup, but it's just to illustrate that you should be prepared to adapt and modify your entire rig to get the most out of in-home game streaming. It's not outright necessary, but it can work wonders for sure.

Using Steam Remote Play for In-Home Game Streaming

The single handiest and most easily accessible software option for in-home game streaming is absolutely Steam Remote Play. Though some swear by other solutions - which we will get to later on - we find Remote Play to be a stellar option once properly configured, and the beauty of it is that it skips the dreadful operating system navigation and lets you jump straight into games themselves. All fully integrated with your Steam client, to boot.

Note, too, that not having games purchased on Steam doesn't actually preclude you from playing them via Remote Play. Any game can be added to Steam via the 'Add Non-Steam Game' option in the lower left corner of the interface, and this includes your Microsoft Store, Epic, or entirely unaffiliated titles to boot! Obviously, Valve won't tell you this is possible outright because they want you to play Steam games first and foremost, but there's nothing stopping you from doing so.

There are several things you need to do on your host PC to create an optimal streaming setup. To do so, open Steam's settings menu and scroll down to the 'Remote Play' tab. There, do the following tweaks:

• Enable Remote Play
• Pair Steam Link with all the receiver devices you wish to use Remote Play on (set the proper PIN and input when requested)
• Enable 'Allow Direct Connection (IP sharing)', as this allows you to use your local area network, rather than the Internet
• Enable the 'Advanced Host Options' toggle
• Enable the 'Change desktop resolution to match streaming client' toggle
• Disable the 'Use NVFBC capture on Nvidia GPU'
• Enable the hardware encoder
• Enable the 'Prioritize network traffic' toggle

And that's about all you need to do on your host PC, unless you've got a fairly exotic use-case. You should be able to move on to your client device(s) from this point on!

Streaming to a Steam Deck

Let's start with the obvious client device: the Steam Deck. This is a wonderful gaming device, especially if you've got the OLED model at hand, but its hardware is getting a bit long in the tooth and can't keep up with the cutting-edge AAAs we nowadays get. Unreal 5, in particular, is a sore spot for Valve's original handheld.

Thing is, you can still play AAs, indies, and older releases on your Deck just fine natively, while in-home streaming takes care of the latest and greatest AAAs. With proper home networking, we can vouch for this being a phenomenal and nigh-indistinguishable option from native play! Provided you tweak the following settings on your client Steam Deck:

• Enable the 'Advanced Client Options' toggle
• Set Video quality to 'Beautiful'
• Set Bandwidth Limit to 40 MB/s
• Set Framerate Limit to 60 FPS on the base Deck, 90 on the OLED model (then modify accordingly on a per-game basis)
• Set Resolution Limit to 'Automatic'
• Disable the 'Hardware Decoding' toggle

This is going to get you the optimal balance between performance and visual quality with minimum latency and virtually no effect on the remainder of your local area network. Neat stuff!

Streaming to a Mobile Phone

The biggest caveat when streaming from your PC to a mobile phone - be it Android or Apple - is whether you've got a gamepad or not. We cannot overstate the importance of this bit here: you need an actual controller of some sort to be able to enjoy PC/console-tier games on your phone, and the good news is that there's such a huge glut of phone controllers on the market that it shouldn't be hard to find one. Choices range from regular home console type gamepads all the way to the likes of Backbone One, which wraps around your device to give you a Steam Deck-esque gaming experience.

Whichever controller you end up getting, setting up Remote Play on your phone is easy! Just head on over to Google Play or the Apple Store and download the official Valve Steam Link app. The specifics of which settings work best will vary depending on your phone, however, so there may be some trial and error on that front.

Streaming directly to a Smart TV (Android)

There's really not much to be said here... if you've got a Smart TV with an Android-based OS, you simply follow the steps you'd take on a phone, and you're good to go! Steam Link really is the ultimate Remote Play app, and the good thing about streaming to a TV instead of a phone is that you can hard-wire your Internet into it, which in turn massively improves input latency.

Honestly though, a Smart TV with Steam Link installed may well be the perfect choice for those who just aren't in the mood to build a media HTPC for their living room/bedroom setup. Add a solid controller to the TV, and you've got all the makings of an honest-to-goodness console-level gaming experience.

Streaming to a VR Headset

Believe it or not, you can even stream your PC games to a VR headset nowadays! Well, to just a handful of pre-selected VR headsets, namely Meta Quest 2, 3, and Pro, but the option is there regardless.

The setup is fairly similar to that of any other non-PC, non-Deck machine, wherein you install Steam Link and access your host PC's gaming library using it. No cables, no proprietary tidbits, no fussing about. Except for Meta's shovelware, that is, but that's a different can of worms.

Streaming to a Different PC

Using Steam Remote Play on a secondary PC on the same network as the host PC is basically a non-issue at this point. You only really need to pair the machines to one another using the procedure we outlined above, and the two PCs' respective local libraries will then intersect and be available on both rigs.

If you're running Steam using a Windows or Linux PC, there's literally nothing else you need other than to complete the pairing setup between the two rigs. Playing games on a fast local network is going to be basically indistinguishable from playing them natively, though all the other caveats apply. Make sure that you customize the client PC settings, too, according to what we outlined in the Steam Deck section!

Using Moonlight for In-Home Game Streaming

One big thing to keep in mind about Valve's native Steam Remote Play is that it just doesn't work flawlessly across the board. Even though it works phenomenally well on my personal setup, that hasn't been the experience that many others have had, and that means you may wish to give some alternatives a shot, as well.

The most prolific of them all is certainly the Sunshine/Moonlight combo: a comprehensive open-source game streaming software. This is arguably more powerful than Valve's own onboard Steam Link/Remote Play solution, but it's not integrated directly into Steam, so it's not as easily and immediately available.

The thing that makes Moonlight notable is that it's an open-source version of Nvidia's own GameStream protocol, as used in the old Nvidia Shield handheld if you remember that blast from the past. The resulting service is a powerful toolkit that supports:

• 4K @ 120 FPS streaming
• HDR
• Support for an extremely wide variety of platforms, from Android mobile phones to Raspberry Pi setups
• Game server hosting

And lots more. Crucially, it's fully open-source and entirely free, which makes it an excellent choice practically across the board. You can find Moonlight and its host applet, Sunshine, using the official project website.

From that point on, the setup isn't particularly challenging, but it is a bit of a process. We recommend reading up on official Moonlight documentation before jumping in. It does boil down to setting up a host machine and a client access point in much the same way as Remote Play does:

• Install the latest version of Sunshine on your host PC, then reboot the machine.
• Start the Sunshine server on your host PC and finish the configuration process via your browser of choice: you can safely ignore the safety warning that pops up during the setup.
• Start the Moonlight app on your client PC and confirm that both of the pertinent devices are connected to the same network. It shouldn't take more than a couple of seconds before the Sunshine host pops up in the selection menu.
• Complete the pairing process using the PIN you've set up prior, and you're golden.

Do note that there's a tad more setup needed if you're trying to get HDR to work, but all information on that is available via the official guide document, so reference it if necessary. Moonlight developer recommends a reasonably fast wireless network or solid Ethernet backhaul to all of your Internet access points for solid stream quality. All sensible recommendations, really.

Jump into In-Home Streaming Today!

And that about does it for our short(ish) primer on the wonderful world of in-home game streaming! Why, yes, we do sound like an early-2000s Microsoft straight-to-TV commercial on purpose. Why do you ask? All cheekiness aside, we hope this gave you insight into the what's what of game streaming, because it really is an invaluable tool if you're just trying to game away from your main desktop PC.

We'll keep this guide topped-up and up-to-date as much as humanly possible, so you can keep referencing it whenever necessary. And, of course, do stay tuned for more guides like these, because we've got a bunch more planned for the near and far future.

For example, we recommend checking out this massive low-spec PC optimization guide from a few years back! We've topped it up with latest info and a few fairly advanced tweaks over the years, and we think even mid-range gaming PCs can profit from leveraging them.