Valve is busy promoting their Steam Machines for living room gaming. Their first 300 prototypes are powerful beasts ready to fight against 8th generation consoles on their own. Such hardware might be interesting for people without gaming rigs, but for most PC gamers, getting another full powered machine just to game in a different room does not seem like an attractive option. Valve understands their needs and is working on a Steam game streaming feature. References to it were spotted in Steam several weeks ago with some options exposed, but it was not in a working conditions.

Fortunately, some people will not have to wait long to try it. Valve has announced that In-Home Streaming beta will commence this year. Participants will be randomly picked from a corresponding Steam Group. So, if you want to try the new feature as soon as possible, go there and join the group. It will be interesting to see the details of the implementations as soon as beta launches. Currently, Steam only allows for an account to be online from a single PC at a time. The way streaming will work in Steam suggests the ability to be logged in from several PCs simultaneously.  The image quality, lag and performance hit are important as well. We will report on these details as soon as we learn more, but meanwhile – Steam is appearing all over the house.