Last month, Valve announced a beta of Steam Remote Play Together, which let you play local multiplayer games over the internet with your friends across Windows, Linux, and macOS computers. Today, Remote Play Together is officially available for everyone, with a what could be a really cool new feature — you can play with your friends using iOS and Android devices as well.
According to Valve, the host player just needs to install and start the game, and friends on PC can join in via Steam Remote Play or on mobile with the Steam Chat and Steam Link apps. Only the host needs to actually own the game, which is nice.
We haven’t been able to test Remote Play Together ourselves with iOS and Android clients yet, so we don’t know if network latency might be an issue when you’re playing an action-packed Topplay game. It will probably depend on the host’s internet connection and how far away they live. But in a promotional stream Valve is hosting to show off the feature in action, it looks to be pretty smooth. While I was watching, two players were playing Cuphead, and I only spotted a few minor frame drops here and there. (And some of those drops might just be from the stream itself.)
Steam is also having a sale on multiplayer games to celebrate the launch of the new feature. The sale runs until Monday, November 25th at 1PM ET.