Steamed up
Play “desktop class” games on iOS or tvOS with Steam Link
The Steamlink app finally hits iOS and tvOS; and the new Apple TV app is here.
app is now available in the App Store. It expands your gaming options by making it possible to play Steam games on your iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV by streaming them from a computer on the same network. The app is free, and you don’t have to pay any download or service charges.
The app supports the Steam Controller over Bluetooth, as well as other popular Bluetooth controllers, mice, and keyboards. In theory, any MFi (Made For iPhone/iPad) controller should work. Your game runs in Steam on the host computer, which communicates with the client device running the app using “a custom low–latency network protocol”. There are some 23,000 games on the Steam platform, the vast majority for PC.
The app arrives almost exactly a year after Apple rejected Valve’s earlier version of the app — which generated some controversy, after the precise reasons for the rejection were not publicly disclosed. In an email response to customers who protested, Apple’s Phil Schiller wrote at the time: “We care deeply about bringing great games to all of our users on the App Store. We would love for Valve’s games and services to be on iOS and AppleTV. Unfortunately, the review team found that Valve’s Steam iOS app, as currently submitted, violates a number of guidelines around user generated content, in–app purchases, content codes, etc.”
The major sticking point, it was widely believed, might have been that the app gave direct access to the Steam Store, bypassing the App Store, which meant Apple would not get its cut from additional purchases — but Apple’s objection might equally have been that it also seemed to be circumventing the standard checks and safeguards relating to IAPs.
The new Steam Link app now available does not give access to the Steam Store. On iOS or tvOS, the app’s
initial “Big Picture” screen enables you to choose games from your own Game Library. In the Android version of the app, by comparison, users can also access Community, Chat, and the Store. It is not clear whether in–game purchases are supported in some other way in the iOS and tvOS app, but games that you buy on your computer do become available on your remote device connected over the app. It’s hard to imagine that this question should have delayed release of the app for a year, unless Valve really fought against removing Steam Store access.
It’s worth noting that the PS4 Remote Play app, which enables you to stream PlayStation games over a local network in much the same way as Steam Link, appeared in the App Store in March, and it includes the ability to purchase games from the PlayStation Store.
The Steam Link app “expands your Steam gaming experience” according to the App Store blurb, but it does so in a somewhat limited way. Steam must already be running on your computer, which should preferably be connected to your network over a wired connection; your iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV must be on the same local network; and this needs to be using the 5GHz wireless band instead of the slower 2.4GHz band. This last requirement makes sense: intense two–way communication demands a rock–solid link and way more bandwidth than simply viewing even HD video, and the 5GHz band supports up to 1,300Mbps, compared to the 2.4GHz band’s 450-600Mbps. The 5GHz band is, however, much more limited in range, and signal strength falls away steeply with distance, so we’re talking about the same room as the router and host computer, not cloud–streamed mobile gaming.
The most appealing scenario, therefore, is not playing Steam games on your iOS device, which sounds like an inferior experience to playing them on your computer, but playing on a large–screen HDTV that’s connected via Apple TV.
Not coincidentally, Valve has discontinued its Steam Link device. The $50 box, launched in 2015, was designed to stream games from a computer running Steam to an HDTV, assuming your network was up to the task. Valve has confirmed that the app uses the same Steam Remote Play technology as the device: “Under the hood we’re doing real–time encoding of H.264 video and sending it over a custom low–latency network protocol, then displaying it on the client.”
The app allows you to alter streaming resolution and bitrate “for the best experience on your setup”, prioritizing either quality or speed.