> While the hardware is no longer being sold the software sort of lives on. In an android app among other things.

It is built-in on every Steam. You can basically press two buttons and stream from your desktop to laptop if both have Steam with same accounts logged in.

> Tangentially it almost feels like steam could make a stadia like thing work. They have most of the moving parts including crucially, the bit google didn't, an established base of customers. Tomorrow steam could introduce a "play your games anywhere on any hardware" feature and no one would be surprised.

Already possible. While not so optimized as Games-on-whales.

That's not the same thing at all. Stadia was never about streaming from your own dedicated pc, it was about cloud computing. Something Valve does not have. In order for Steam Link to become Stadia, Valve requires the same data center capacity to serve games.

Steam Link has saved my ass more times than I can count.

VPN having issues, can't connect to any of my stack? Atleast I have a desktop on my LAN I can remote into...from my phone...

Basically anytime I have network issues while I'm away, reliable Steam Link connects me back to my infra ~97% of the time.

They also have datacenters in most major cities, so latency would be minimal. They're one of the only services that allows me to actually saturate my home internet bandwidth. But hosting game data and actually running the games is a lot different.

Wouldnt they need racks of GPUs to do that at scale?

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