When I first got the steam link I was ecstatic, I could play lots of good games on a big tv screen, Dark souls, Yakuza 0, American Trucking Simulator, Valkyria Chronicles, etc.

But as games have continued to evolve, and the steam link has been deprecated, I'm finding more and more cases where the link is next to useless.

Have a game from Epic? Sometimes it works flawlessly (Outer Wilds) other times, the DRM of the game completely prevents launching it! (Tetris Effect)

Xbox games pass or any game from the MS store? Well you can't even add these .exes to steam without a huge workaround (Mostly Microsoft's fault), and when you do put in the work to open these games on steam, it usually doesn't pass your controllers through.

Then there are simply games that work badly with the link for no reason. I recently started AC Odyssey, a game that will probably occupy me for 100+ hours, it sure would be nice to play it from the comfort of my couch. Unfortunately, even though it plays flawlessly on my PC (and is run from Steam) it runs like a slideshow on steam link! How come? The googling i've done doesn't really tell me, origins had a similar issue, perhaps AC checks online too often, uses too much CPU, maybe it is one or both overlays from steam and uplay? Whatever the answer, fiddling with settings hasn't improved anything.

Third-party utilities exist to help some of this stuff, like Global Steam controller (GloSC) but it's quite clunky and i'm not necessarily comfortable with where these tools come from. I'm starting to think Steam link's days are in the past and that I should seek out a new solution, maybe a long HDMI setup, or a streaming alternative.

Has anyone else had issues more and more lately with their steam link?

I haven't used my steam link in probably close to two years

I had been getting annoyed by needing to go unlock my desktop (and sometimes deal with pop up menus) when I wanted to connect to it. Probably some setting I could fix, but the effort required to figure out a good search string was more than periodically walking to my office to type in my password.

Then I got a new monitor (gsync yo) and had a resolution mismatch to deal with. Probably should have actually tested to see how the streaming reconciled that, but I was on an elite dangerous kick at the time and by the time I got that out of my system my will to deal with this and other issues just turned me off.

I think that, like a lot of things, Valve had some great ideas. But as the market got more crowded they basically stopped trying and stuck with what they know to be profitable for now. Eventually we'll see a better more store-agnostic solution that focuses on the corner cases and slight hiccups.

I've not used my Link device in ages, but use the Android app (on ShieldTV) pretty much daily) with no problems at all ... for Steam stuff anyway. Valve stopped support for the Link device a while back, I think.

The only time in memory that I thought it had let me down was when it started dropping frames and the input lag became really noticeable. Turned out it was a faulty CAT6 cable.

I didn't pick mine up until one of the big sales, but I still use mine occasionally with no issues. Recently I've been playing Bastion and AC Origins. I do have a wired network at home so that probably helps a lot with latency and stability.

Really, the only trouble I've had is setting it up to work with the Switch Pro Controller, probably because it wasn't designed to be used as a third-party peripheral on PC. It also uses the Japanese layout (Nintendo [A] and Playstation [O] are used for Confirm and have the same placement) but I was pleased to see that Steam has a setting to work with that.

This is new for you? In my experience, getting non-Steam games to work with the Steam Link has always been hit or miss. It's what really bugs me about the current fad of Epic exclusives.

@dave_tacitus

Nah. Valve still supports both the original hardware and the SL app on other hardware.

Great idea in theory but the clunky UI and lack QoL features keep it collecting dust under my tv...

You don't need to add .exes to steam to use the link. Just fire it up and exit big picture mode.

As for things like Tetris Effect not allowing restreams, that's hardly Steam or the Links fault.

I use mine almost daily and with most games I'm doing it after exiting big picture mode.