Wow, when they were practically giving those away, I figured they were washing their hands of it. It’s amazing that it’s still being supported.
Mine was $1! I love it. I just bought a wireless mouse and keyboard for it, because it’s honestly just a great way to stream stuff. Now my computer can be in my living room, and my office at the same time!
I’ve got one I never hooked up. Can you just control the computer in general or do you only get access to steam? I wanted to jellyfin with it maybe
You can control the computer but it boots in big picture so you need to escape it to get to the desktop
Can control it in general, but the first few times you’ll have to run over and look at the monitor to do stuff.
It generally assumes it’s being used “close” to the computer, so instead of complex pairing, it just shows a code on one you type into the other.
Sometimes windows will get antsy and pop up a dialogue that can only be interacted with locally, but it’s only one or twice ever.
Think about it though. Probably some overlap with the deck. And hiring one dev very part time to keep this thing alive is nothing for them. Which makes the steam deck way more lucrative
Tell me you don’t know how valve works without telling me you don’t know how valve works.
I just read in Wikipedia that Valve is privately helded.
There must be something magical in the fact that they don’t need to feed their shareholders with mountains of cash every quarter, and actually focus on their customers, as happened in this post.
Fun fact, they used to be public but Gabe took it back private after realizing how shitty it was having to answer to shareholders.
True, private companies are generally more focused on customer satisfaction, but that can suddenly change, for instance when the owner dies, and the new owners don’t share the same ideals.
Private companies have a certain single point of failure built-in by having often just one or sometimes a small number of owners.
Nobody really knows what will happen when Gabe dies.
I just hope that valve becomes a worker cooperative… That would be the most stable form of company that probaly stays focused on customer satisfaction long term, since workers tend to favor providing long-term profits via good service instead of short term gains, for high frequency traders.
And the fact is they still make a mountain of cash every quarter, just by focusing on their customers.
I don’t know about that. They run one of the most predatory examples of gambling in gaming.
The new EU ruling really brought to light how big of a problem the CS:GO gambling is.
Is gambling really that bad though? It’s voluntary. Valve isn’t forcing you to buy keys or cases if you don’t want them
Also to be fair they tried to kill PSN store on the PS3 but the resulting backlash made them realize to do so would kill customer faith in the PS4 and PS5 PSN stores and so they backed off. Nintendo could only get away with it because they already trained us not to trust their online stores and buy physical only. Since Steam doesn’t have a physical option they need to play their cards right.
Twitter (sorry, X.com) is also privately held now so it’s not always a happy story :/
That’s actually really awesome.
I bought one during the clearance sale for the price of shipping, assuming that it would be abandoned but maybe still useful as a low-power linux server. I guess I ought to set it up and take advantage of it.
Thanks, Valve, for not letting these things become instant e-waste.
8 years later and I still haven’t used it once
Every time I’ve tried to use it, I’ve either had to head downstairs to the PC to fix something or had terrible lag and artifacting making it unusable for even turn based games like Xcom…
But I still love that little box. I’ve got two of them and I have Steam Controllers to pair with them but I’ve never had luck with them. Wired, wireless, no luck.
Have you tried Moonlight? It’s an open source streaming alternative software that you can install on Steam Links, streams using Nvidia’s GeForce Experience as the broadcasting part and Moonlight receives it.
https://github.com/LizardByte/Sunshine works for AMD/Intel/Nvidia :-)
Unfortunately the NVIDIA part isn’t open-source. With that said, for what they are, products like Moonlight and Parsec actually are really good.
Moonlight was a better alternative a few years ago when I tried it but I just built more computers. I’ve got three towers in the same room at this point, not to mention the Switch and Steam Deck. If I’m ever far enough away from video games to make me consider streaming them, I’m usually too lazy to bother.
Every time I’ve tried to use it, I’ve either had to head downstairs to the PC to fix something or had terrible lag and artifacting making it unusable for even turn based games like Xcom…
That’s not normal. While Steam Link is a bit older by now and as a result there are constrains like streamed resolution, your problems look more likely connected to your network than Steam Link itself. Digital Foundry talked about PlayStation Portal recently which also includes a two minutes chapter about best practices that apply to other game streaming devices as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEoo_gbOBYo
