Multiplayer games! One of the greatest pleasure of existence. With the rise of the Internet, multiplayer games have become a lot more common. However, not all co-op games allow you to play online. Valve is attempting to fix this situation by a introducing a delicious new feature called Remote Play.
Coming to Valve’s Steam game launcher and Remote Play, the feature will allow you to play local-only games with your friends over the internet! Yes, we get the contradiction and will explain it in a moment.
Announcing the launch, Valve’s Alden Kroll said:
Today our team announced another great new platform feature that will be built into Steam: Remote Play Together. This will allow friends to play local co-op games together over the internet as though they were in the same room together.
Basically, one of the players will host the erstwhile-local only game on their computer. In what is an extremely clever sleight of hand (in a manner of speaking) Steam will capture all the visuals, controller and keyboard inputs, and share it with all the players. By combining the data, Steam will basically let the system think that all the players are playing together.
Of course, you have to consider the fact that this is a new feature and not all games will have the same level of playability. What’s more, despite the improvements in streaming thanks to faster internets, there is always going to be some latency to deal with. This is also why Steam has kept the feature completely optional and developers can choose to opt out of the beta.
As per a note on the Unity developer forums, the feature will go live in the next couple of weeks:
Your local multiplayer games will soon be improved with automatic support for Remote Play Together on Steam. All local multiplayer, local co-op, and split-screen games will be automatically included in the Remote Play Together beta, which we plan to launch the week of October 21.
What do you think about this brand new feature? Which game would you like to play with friends? Let us know in the comments!
