Steam Remote Play Together

Image by 11333328 from Pixabay

Steam Remote Play Together finally goes into beta

Steam’s new feature will allow players to enjoy local co-op modes that they previously weren’t able to play because they had no one to play with locally.

Steam Remote Play Together

Image by 11333328 from Pixabay

Update 22 October 2019: The beta for Remote Play together has now officially gone live. To try the new feature out all, you’ll need to do is join the Steam Beta program.

Once you’ve signed up for the beta, all you’ll need to do is pick one of your games that have local co-op open it up and start a local game on your machine. Now you’ll just need to find a friend online willing to play with you.

Simply right-click on your friend in your friend list and choose the Remote Play Together option from the dialogue. Your friend will now be able to see the local game and their controller should work as if it was connected to your system.

In addition to this, all the controls for voice chat and audio will be available in one place. As an added bonus users won’t have to be on the same system so you’ll be able to play a game on your PC with a user on iOS or Linux.


14 October: Steam will be rolling out a new feature later this month; it will allow users to play local co-op games together over the Internet. The remote play-together feature was announced by Valve to developers via the Steamworks website.

The beta for the program is expected on 21 October. Currently, most users buy titles with certain modes in mind; and it’s not that uncommon for certain game modes involving local co-op to be wholly ignored.

Enjoy local co-op modes even if your friends are far away

As such, many players don’t get to experience everything their favourite game has to offer. Local co-op relies on you having players in your area to play with.

With the price of games today, anything that helps to get more hours of enjoyment from a game is very welcome.

Steam’s Remote Play Together will make it possible for players to enjoy local co-op modes that they previously weren’t able to play because they had no one to play with locally.

Based on what we know so far, it doesn’t seem like developers will need to do much additional dev work to enable the feature.

How does Steam’s Remote Play Together work?

Valve are confident that the new feature will work automatically for “all local multiplayer, local co-op and split-screen games”. The new Steam feature will basically be streaming the main players’ screen to a second user.

That user will then be watching the game stream as if he was sitting next to the main player, with Remote Play Together sending the second players game inputs back to the main player.

Don’t worry if that all sounded too complicated. All you really need to know is that you’ll be able to play split-screen co-op games over the internet soon; and your life will be better for it.

You’ll need a fast Internet connection

Of course, Steam aren’t the first to do this. Playstation has had the Share Play service for PS4 for some time now. Naturally, Remote Play Together will require a fast, stable internet connection with it relying on streaming video.

It’ll be interesting to see how well Steam can implement the feature.

Dealing with input delays is hard enough when playing on a dedicated server. Managing to create a fair and fast user experience while also dealing with streaming video will be an entirely different challenge.

So, now’s the time to dig out local co-op classics like Overcooked; channel your inner Gordon Ramsey and shout at your faraway friends as you ruin your dinner service, together.