[[2026 Games#^53c076|2026 Games]] I have never been interested in streaming a game. Not out of hate, aside from laughing at corporations that think it’s the future of games in general (it’s not). I just never felt a need. Lately though, my office is hot and I don’t wanna sit there to play a game. So rather than do that, I’ve installed the streaming app **Moonlight** to a few of my things, like my **Steam Deck** and **Ayn Thor**. And it’s been…shockingly nice! It hasn’t been a perfect experience, don’t get me wrong. I had to figure out a lot via trial and error. But now that I’ve settled in, I’ve really enjoyed it. There are basically two ways to go about it: either streaming my desktop PC directly, or booting straight into Steam Big Picture Mode. The latter is the easiest thing to set up — the only gigantic first world problem I’ve had is needing to change my ultrawide’s resolution before I do it, but after that it’s smooth sailing. Streaming directly to my PC is nice because it lets me play a game without needing my monitor to be turned on. But the trade-off *there* is that you have to navigate the PC on the device you’re streaming which is difficult to do, especially on a smaller handheld. To be honest, I’m still working out the kinks there. I’m trying to see if I can automatically have my monitor boot up Playnite to replicate the Steam Big Picture Mode experience. As for playing the games themselves, I haven’t had much trouble at all. The main thing has been avoiding games that are bitrate killers, with huge amounts of particles and whatnot. My computer is Ethernet-tethered, so I get next to zero latency issues. I even manage to kill bosses in [[Nioh 3]] no problem. It’s all running at a crisp 1440p. I haven’t tried to go higher, but only because I don’t need to: it’d make no difference on my **Thor** regardless. Being able to break away from the anchor that is my PC has been wonderful for my mental. I like not being cooped up in my office in order to clear my backlog. I can play on my couch, either on my handheld or with my Steam Deck docked to my TV, or in bed. And when the weather is nice enough to not try and kill me, I can even hang out on my swing-chair on the balcony. Again, there’s no way that I’d ever purely stream my library - nor would I even dare to try to stream outside of my own home. But I'm glad I figured out **Moonlight**. It might save me some back pain from sitting at my desk too long.