Trying Out Steam In-Home Streaming With Hamachi For Remote Play

Final Thoughts on Steam In-Home Streaming

Ultimately, if your goal is to stream your entire PC library to a machine on the go or other off-network locations, the truth is that it’s entirely possible! From our testing with Amazon’s Web Services though, it seems as though the best option is to use your own private machine with Hamachi rather than spend the kind of time and money it would take to roll a personal cloud gaming server. With the rate that consumer level service is growing towards gigabit cable, and the current cost and complications of getting a functioning remote implementation of in-home streaming, it’s unlikely that the setup attempted here will ever be a more viable option that simply wiring a home network, upgrading network hardware, and upgrading in bandwidth.

To sum up our findings here:

• Off-network play is possible via Hamachi (on Windows and OSX).
• Non-Steam games are streamable.
• 10-15Mbps is a likely minimum for upload bandwidth of the host machine.
• Conversely 10-15Mbps is a recommended minimum download speed for the client machine.
• Users are obviously more likely to experience latency issues through WiFi or remote Hamachi streaming.
• There seems to exist no cost-effective way to create a private cloud gaming server.

That last point is not to suggest that cloud gaming is unrealistic in general. Steam In-Home Streaming and PlayStation Now, are clear indicators that there’s market interest in cloud gaming. But in my opinion, it seems like there’s still a few innovations in encoding, decoding, and latency management that will need to happen before people start replacing their local gameplay setups with cloud-based solutions.

If you have any thoughts about Steam In-Home Streaming be sure to leave them in the comment section below.