> While the hardware is no longer being sold the software sort of lives on. In an android app among other things.

It is built-in on every Steam. You can basically press two buttons and stream from your desktop to laptop if both have Steam with same accounts logged in.

> Tangentially it almost feels like steam could make a stadia like thing work. They have most of the moving parts including crucially, the bit google didn't, an established base of customers. Tomorrow steam could introduce a "play your games anywhere on any hardware" feature and no one would be surprised.

Already possible. While not so optimized as Games-on-whales.

▲ greggsy 21 hours ago | parent [-]

The thing I found limiting when I tried to run Steam remotely from my lounge room was the need to actually interact with the host PC at certain points, not just during the initial setup. I found this is the same on a lot of similar platforms, and it’s made worse when RDP clobbers the graphics settings.

A truly headless solution with a web ui would get me really interested.

▲ nicce 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Valve has truly headless runner (gamescope) for Linux, e.g. you can start it manually from command-line over ssh

  gamescope \
    --backend headless \
    -W 1920 -H 1080 \
    -w 3840 -h 2160 \
    -r 60 \
    --cursor-scale-height 1080 \
    --force-grab-cursor \
    -- steam -gamepadui -pipewire-dmabuf

You still need the initial setup for pairing.

But it has many issues compared to Games on Whales, for example, which is much more efficient and scales cursor better.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

▲ jvanderbot 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Furthermore, it will log in and unlock your host pc. If you're across town at a coffee shop and your 4 year old kids are near the host pc and see it unlock and start playing a game, you better believe they're gonna wreck your save file.

Not to mention greater security concerns.

	▲	JeremyNT 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yep, it's really only an option for a dedicated gaming PC (or a VM with the the GPU passed into it).