Valve Adds Remote Game Management to Steam

Andy Chalk

One Flag, One Fleet, One Cat
Nov 12, 2002
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Valve Adds Remote Game Management to Steam


The Steam client now allows users to purchase and install games from anywhere.

Good news for anyone who's ever wondered why they couldn't install new Steam games on their home PC from remote: now you can! The latest update to the Steam client enables remote downloads from any web browser, even on mobile devices, as long as the Steam software is running on your home system.

Making it go is simple. Update to the new Steam beta client, then go somewhere else and log into your Steam account at steampowered.com [http://store.steampowered.com/]. [You can do it from home, too, but you might as well make the most of it. Go out and grab a coffee. Sit and relax for awhile. Enjoy the fresh spring air.] Go to "Community," click on "Games" and boom, you're now looking at a list of all your games and their "installation state" on your rig.

And now for the exciting part! Got a new game in the list that isn't yet installed? Find it and hit "install" and then stand back, because a remote download is about to go off!

I suppose this could make browsing Steam sales at work a little more compelling but the real benefit is the ability to start a game download from pretty much anywhere and have it waiting for you, ready to play, when you get home. For people who buy a lot of Steam games and spend a lot of time waiting for them to download, that's pretty cool.

The Steam client update is a beta version, but we all know that Valve doesn't make test versions available to the public until they're pretty much 100 percent ready to go anyway. It's a safe bet that everything's going to work fine, in other words, so if you want to give it a shot, get the details [although there's really not much more to know] at the Steam forums [http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2679418].


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Dreadman75

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Jul 6, 2011
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And so Valve added another notch to their belt of great features that don't come at the expense of their fans and customers.

Good on ya Valve!

ThriKreen said:
A million wallets cried out in pain and were suddenly silenced.
Bah! The wallets will get over it. At least that money isn't being used on Origin.
 

happy_turtle

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Apr 11, 2010
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Am I the only one wondering why someone would be leaving their home computers on 24/7?
Think of all the electricity you're wasting by not turning it off when you're out the house!
 

Steve the Pocket

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Mar 30, 2009
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I'm not seeing the point to this. If I'm leaving the house and want to download a game while I'm out, I'll just tell the computer to start downloading before I leave. There's nothing in this article about being able to remotely buy games, so I'm going to assume they haven't actually implemented that yet. Either way, it looks like I'd have to have the computer running and not in sleep mode for this to work, which I have no intention of doing.
 

Yal

We are a rattlesnake
Dec 22, 2010
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Steve the Pocket said:
I'm not seeing the point to this. If I'm leaving the house and want to download a game while I'm out, I'll just tell the computer to start downloading before I leave. There's nothing in this article about being able to remotely buy games, so I'm going to assume they haven't actually implemented that yet. Either way, it looks like I'd have to have the computer running and not in sleep mode for this to work, which I have no intention of doing.
You've always been able to buy games through the website, which is accessible from anywhere.

I'm as likely to buy games at work as I am at home, and I've occasionally even remoted in to my box at home to start up a large download. I think Deus Ex was the last time I did that, so it's not like I was really waiting for this feature, but I'll get some use out of it.
 

Wieke

Quite Dutch.
Mar 30, 2009
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happy_turtle said:
Am I the only one wondering why someone would be leaving their home computers on 24/7?
Think of all the electricity you're wasting by not turning it off when you're out the house!
Wake-on-LAN [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN]?

Or maybe they have a really slow internet connection and have their pc turned on to download stuff.
 

McGuinty1

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Oct 30, 2010
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Yal said:
Steve the Pocket said:
I'm not seeing the point to this. If I'm leaving the house and want to download a game while I'm out, I'll just tell the computer to start downloading before I leave. There's nothing in this article about being able to remotely buy games, so I'm going to assume they haven't actually implemented that yet. Either way, it looks like I'd have to have the computer running and not in sleep mode for this to work, which I have no intention of doing.
You've always been able to buy games through the website, which is accessible from anywhere.

I'm as likely to buy games at work as I am at home, and I've occasionally even remoted in to my box at home to start up a large download. I think Deus Ex was the last time I did that, so it's not like I was really waiting for this feature, but I'll get some use out of it.
Yeah, same here. I usually VNC (Windows Remote only allows one client per session which annoys me) from my phone because I'm not a big fan of either the Steam app or the new mobile website which I haven't figured out how to disable yet. This will probably be more secure, I imagine that since your Steam client will already be running at home, the Steam server will probably just relay instructions between the remote and the client.

As far as tripping UAC or whatever, the only time that UAC actually pops up for me is when I go to run the game after it finishes downloading and it does the final setup and installs DirectX/.NET framwork/Punkbuster/etc. If you're just telling it to download the data, I don't think you will have an access issue, at least as far as I can tell. (I know you didn't ask this, I saw it in the Facebook comment feed on the article page and thought I would bring it up here)

Wieke said:
Wake-on-LAN [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN]?

Or maybe they have a really slow internet connection and have their pc turned on to download stuff.
Yeah, even though my internet has been much better since the new year, it still takes a couple hours to download most games.
 

lacktheknack

Je suis joined jewels.
Jan 19, 2009
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happy_turtle said:
Am I the only one wondering why someone would be leaving their home computers on 24/7?
Think of all the electricity you're wasting by not turning it off when you're out the house!
My virus scanner takes two to four hours to run. I work five-hour shifts.

This would come in very handy if I caught a Steam sale while on break.
 

Chunga the Great

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Sep 12, 2010
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ThriKreen said:
A million wallets cried out in pain and were suddenly silenced.
The deals were simply too much for their souls to handle.

OT: Excellent news for those of us whose download speed goes up to an astounding 350 kilobytes per second.
 

Formica Archonis

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Nov 13, 2009
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happy_turtle said:
Am I the only one wondering why someone would be leaving their home computers on 24/7?
Think of all the electricity you're wasting by not turning it off when you're out the house!
For me I get the best of both worlds. I built a low-power PC that runs 24/7 and does assorted tasks for me so my main one is only on when I'm using it.

I can see where Valve is coming from, since I use similar trickery for this very site. (I can't really watch videos at work because the connection is too damn slow, but I can tell my 24/7 box to load them up so they're ready when I get home.) But I did that as much for the intellectual challenge of rigging it up as the convenience. This almost seems like overkill and frankly unneeded complexity. Too much of this and Steam will become a feeping creature [http://catb.org/jargon/html/F/feeping-creaturism.html].
 

Steve the Pocket

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Mar 30, 2009
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Formica Archonis said:
I can see where Valve is coming from, since I use similar trickery for this very site. (I can't really watch videos at work because the connection is too damn slow, but I can tell my 24/7 box to load them up so they're ready when I get home.) But I did that as much for the intellectual challenge of rigging it up as the convenience. This almost seems like overkill and frankly unneeded complexity. Too much of this and Steam will become a feeping creature [http://catb.org/jargon/html/F/feeping-creaturism.html].
Steam already has more going on than its creators can, or more likely are willing to, handle. This is a thing Valve does: They get it into their heads to add new features to stuff and then get bored of it and decide to move on to something else right around the time the bug reports start streaming in. (See: Their attempts at putting Steam on the Mac.)