Despite the variety of genre-defining titles that Valve has developed, it’s fair to say that their most dominant product is the Steam client. Given that the titanic platform is used by virtually every PC gamer, it’s almost impossible to escape.
Thankfully, Valve doesn’t hesitate to make frequent updates to the platform to make sure that the millions of users can use the client properly. Their latest set of updates have just gone live, bringing a number of improvements to the client.
The bulk of updates coming are improvements to the Remote Play feature of the Steam client. Remote Play allows friends to play their game across distances with each other so long as at least one member of the group owns the game.
The following changes have been made:
- Added an option to share IP addresses to establish a direct connection
- Throttle downloads on the client while streaming
- Prevent downloads on the client while streaming
- Changing Remote Play settings will now affect any current streaming sessions
- Reduced cursor scale when streaming to mobile devices
Not all of these changes are default, and some will need you to go into your settings to activate them. This is particularly true for throttling and preventing downloads, both of which will require players to activate in their Download settings.
Windows users have a single update meant to help fix reading battery levels on laptops. With this change, the low battery level notifications within the overlay should now work properly.
There are four changes coming to Linux users as well. Valve has updated some runtimes, as well as fixing bundled zenity binary. Additionally, there will now be a progress bar shown when updating pinned libraries.
And those are all the changes! The patch is rather small and mostly just provides quality of life updates for players to help improve the platform as a whole. The changes to Remote Play are especially welcome in this time of social distancing.
As the platform continues to improve, Valve has been putting a great deal of attention towards Remote Play and keeping the client honed for multiplayer interaction. With so many more competitors popping up on PC now that seemingly every major publisher has decided to make their own client, Valve is being pressed to improve at every turn.
With so many hits to production during the COVID-19 pandemic, Valve hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down. After releasing the extremely well-received Half-Life: Alyx, they’re still making sure none of their other products are falling behind.