This week, people that pre-ordered a Steam Link and/or Steam Controller early have started receiving their shipments. This soft launch is a few weeks ahead of the official launch that'll be in November, and Valve seems pretty interested in getting feedback during this time so that they can make tweaks ahead of that date.

As a member of this "elite" group of people that irresponsibly throw money at things of questionable utility, I received a shipment earlier today of both a Steam Link and a Steam Controller. I've spent a few hours messing around with both of them, so I thought I'd go ahead and share some quick initial impressions.

Steam Link

For those unaware, the Steam Link is a $50 box that's about the size of a phone that will stream gameplay from your PC to your TV. It comes packaged with everything you'll need - HDMI, Ethernet, and power cables along with a trio of adapters for the benefit of those with weird power outlets outside of the North America. It's worth pointing out that while Valve "highly recommends" using a wired network connection, the Steam Link does work over wifi (802.11n or 802.11ac), and I imagine it's probably the way most people will want to use this.

Note that this is just my experience and the performance will vary based on your host PC and network setup. My PC is a bit dated and I'm using wifi (802.11n), but I've still gotten pretty good performance. If you have a solid modern gaming PC or are using a wired network, it's possible you could see it working even better.

Easy Setup - The setup is about as easy as any other set top box. You get your standard network configuration options (if you're using wifi), and then you're presented with a list of other PC's on your network that are running Steam. Select the one you want to connect to and you're off to the races. There are a few advanced options you can mess with if necessary, many of which line up with the options that have already been present in Steam In-House Streaming such as setting the streaming quality (fastest/balanced/beautiful) to account for your network and PC performance.

Looks Nice But Not Perfect - Make no mistake, this thing isn't going to look as good as a monitor connected directly to your PC, but it generally works well. I'm playing over wifi and using the "balanced" quality setting, and I've really only noticed a significant amount of MPEG compression artifacts when playing Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, a game that can move pretty quick. When I first started playing, things were hitching up quite a bit, but resetting my router got rid of those issues.

Some Noticeable Latency - If you're playing a game that moves quick, you're definitely going to notice a little bit of input latency. For most games, it's probably not enough to make it totally unplayable, but it's definitely less than ideal. Your networking setup is likely to impact this quite a bit.

Dual Monitor Weirdness - This is probably unique to people using multiple monitor setups, but there are times when I'll briefly get a flash of my two monitor wide desktop flashed up on the screen. This also presents some issues when trying to play some games, windowed and non-Steam games in particular. I'm hoping there's some way around this because I really want to play Hearthstone through the Steam Link, but I can't currently figure out any way to make it not show up as just half of an awkwardly zoomed out view of both of my PC's monitors (EDIT: I did later figure out how to get Hearthstone working but I had to jump through some hoops).

Steam Controller

This is Valve's foray into making an alternative (not a replacement) to the dual stick format controllers that have become the de factor controller option. This controller is primarily designed with the goal of allowing a way for some traditional mouse + keyboard games to be played from the comfort of your couch.

Well Constructed - This isn't some garbage third party controller. It feels very well put together (time will tell if it holds up). The stick has a nice stiffness to it. The triggers and their full press click both feel good, but the throw on the triggers is a bit shallower than I would've liked. The buttons take some time to adjust to due to their position and smaller size, but they feel fine. The pads both feel good, and the rumble feedback feels good (I've been keeping it on the low or mid intensity setting). The grip buttons are also pretty cool, and it makes you wonder why MS and Sony haven't bothered with them before.

A Solid Mouse Substitute - This is the selling point of this controller, and it delivers on a decent amount of its potential. Being able to competently play something like Prison Architect or Civ V comfortably is great. That being said, it does take some time to adjust, and I doubt you're going to be playing anything as intense as StarCraft 2.

Functional But Not Great for Traditional Gamepad Games - This is something that varies from game to game and will likely get better as I adjust to the Steam Controller, but in general, I'd advise you to not throw away your Xbox controllers and Dualshocks just yet. The button position and the different feel of the right pad in comparison to a right thumbstick just make for an experience in some games that doesn't feel good.

Requires Setup - This is something that will probably be alleviated as more users and developers get controllers and start publishing game specific controller profiles, but for the time being, you should expect to have to tweak your settings for every game. On mouse + keyboard games, you may need to adjust mouse sensitivity/momentum or map specific key shortcuts to the buttons. On gamepad games, the right pad behavior will often need tweaking, and you may want to setup functions for the trigger click and grip buttons. I've also noticed that some games that default to the "gamepad" configuration will actually work better with a "mouse" based setup.

Good On-Screen Keyboard - When you need to type something in, the on-screen keyboard does a better job than the typical slow select one-letter at a time deals. This splits the keyboard in half and you can use your thumb on the left/right pads to highlight keys and the left/right triggers respectively to type it. It feels like a natural extension of today's smartphone keyboards, so if you're an experienced texter, you should be able to type stuff out pretty quickly.

Quick Game Specific Impressions

Prison Architect - This is the first thing I tried out, and it immediately made a good case for the Steam Controller and Steam Link. These sorts of tycoon/sim games have been almost exclusively the domain of desktop gaming with a mouse and keyboard, but I was immediately able to get into the swing of things from my couch using the Steam Controller. As soon as you get a feel for the way the momentum of the mouse controls work, you can quickly get to a point where making precise selections feels like second nature.

Assault Android Cactus - I had to spend a not insignificant amount of time tweaking the behavior of the right pad as a stand in for a right stick, but it was fairly competent once I got it dialed in. That being said, this is definitely a case where you're probably better off using an actual dual stick controller.

Binary Domain - This was actually a nightmare to configure for some reason. Default gamepad settings were totally borked, so I mapped keyboard and mouse controls to the controller and enabled Xbox 360 icons in the game. It actually works pretty well, and you can be fairly accurate with the aiming once you get accustomed to it.

Downwell - I'm unsure if this is a general game bug or specific to the Steam Controller, but when I initially started playing I found myself constantly running to the left. Once I resolved this issue by unplugging the Xbox 360 controller plugged into my PC, everything worked perfectly. It's a one button game, so there's not much to screw up.

Hearthstone - Once I got past the hassle of getting Hearthstone to open properly through Steam, it worked very well. It's purely point and click, so the base "Mouse" configuration was perfect.

Heavy Bullets - Worked great after I customized the base FPS controller configuration to the specifics of this game. Aiming is pretty good, but I could maybe have spent a bit more time fine tuning it. Accuracy is at least on par with a thumbstick, if not better.

Invisible, Inc. - Alongside Prison Architect, this is another great demonstration of a very PC style game being brought into a living room environment. My experience with this game also benefited a lot from the fact that the developers had already gone through the trouble of making a great controller configuration - more developers doing this is going to be extremely beneficial to smooth adoption of the Steam Controller.

Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit - The Steam Controller performs about as well as any typical dual stick controller for a game like this. As a point of personal preference though, I think racing games feel better with the analog triggers of the Xbox 360/One controller that have a deeper throw on them. Also worth noting that this is one of the few games I tried that seemed to push the streaming quality limitations of the Steam Link. Any issues I had were minor, but there was definitely some apparent compression artifacting at times.

Read Only Memories - This game and any others where the developers have tagged it as having gamepad support will generally default to the Steam Controller's "Gamepad" configuration. However, this is a prime case of a game that just works much better if you switch over to a mouse oriented configuration.

Tales from the Borderlands - This is genuinely the worst Steam Controller experience that I've had. No matter what I tried, I just couldn't figure out a configuration for the right pad that felt good. Everything I tried felt clunky during the exploration/puzzle moments and led to me missing every single quicktime event that required me to first adjust where I was looking. Setting it up to function like a mouse felt the best, but this game doesn't really support simultaneous use of controller and keyboard so it threw off everything else. Next best was using the "Joystick Move" option with a boosted up sensitivity, but I was still struggling with it.

Undertale - I had some issues using a 360 controller with this game (inputs bugging out occasionally), but since the Steam Controller is able to just simulate actual keyboard input, it worked without a hitch.

I've only tested a few things here and there, and not for a very long time.

MGS5 feels almost perfect but for some reason I cant get the right pad to aim correctly. It only seems to work when I click it in. Could be a glitch but I'm not sure.

Terraria works well.

Nuclear Throne works ok, but aiming is kinda hard. Probably just need more practice.

Skyrim seems to work pretty good once I figured out I should turn off xbox 360 controls in game, then map my pad to keyboard controls.

Bioshock infinite seems to work but I barely messed with it. Aiming with the pad seems hard.

I'd be interested to hear about Lovely Planet. To be good at that game, you really require some twitch camera movement.

Man, I would really like to try out the Steam Controller....if it ever actually becomes available in Australia.

I have an ASUS RT-N66U router and a 200mbps connection. Getting an ethernet cable from my router to the tv/steam link is impossible without drilling holes. How reliable is this thing through wifi?

How does the haptic feedback feel?

So steamlink only works to get games streamed to your tv, right? It's not a replacement for like a roku or chromecast, correct?

Thanks for the writeup! I've been looking forward to hearing your impressions on the controller specifically. I'm curious as to how Valve is going to be updating this thing over the course of the next few weeks now that the consumers who preordered it have it in their hands. They are typically pretty good with software updates for their games and the Steam client, so hopefully that continues over into their hardware as well.

I've been using Steam In-Home Streaming since it was in first in Beta, and I've always somehow gotten better image quality and performance by selecting Beautiful on the client side. Then again, I'm actually streaming it to a computer with a GPU, so it's a different use case entirely. Anyway, it may be worth messing around with some of the different settings on both the client and server sides if you haven't already. After a bit of tweaking, I've gotten it to work quite well even over 802.11n. The recent Steam Client beta update that went out this week improved wireless streaming even further, so anyone who hasn't updated that to that definitely should. It seems like Valve pushed out this major update just before the controllers and boxes shipped out, and the difference is clearly apparent.

At any rate, I can't wait to get my hands on one of these controllers. I have two PCs at home, but these days I am spending much more time in front of the PC that is in my living room hooked up to the TV. I'm using a USB extension cable ran under the baseboard along the wall with a powered USB hub near the recliner where I play games from, and have my mouse & keyboard attached to that. And of course, the ubiquitous wireless 360 controller. However, even though I have a pretty comfortable setup for mouse & keyboard, it's still not an ideal setup and lately I've been thinking about all the games I want to try out with this new Steam controller.

As an aside about Binary Domain, that game is a nightmare to configure for regular 360 controllers, too. I just played it for the first time this week, and it took me quite awhile to get everything set up and working properly. It doesn't help that there is a separate configuration utility, and that none of the options are accessible from in-game. I too found it strange that there was a separate setting to change the button prompts to controller buttons from keyboard - I mean really, who is going to use keyboard on-screen prompts if they are using a 360 controller?

@charlie_victor_bravo: I'm liking the haptic feedback, feels like you have creeky bones for movement and you can also make the touch pad feel clicky.

@beachthunder:I played a few rounds of Lovely Planet and it worked ok, i'd have to play those few rounds with a mouse to see if i'm any better at it.

Also worth noting this thing has a gyro sensor in it that is easy to miss. If you look at the OP's config picture; see that like under the controller that seems to point between thee middle boxes? That's actually trying to point to the controllers gyro sensor. With the gyro, i played some Dirt Rally ( Rally racing, maybe not the best test ) and some Project CARS. Pcars worked fine; there was a noticeable "neutral" zone that the gyro would center too but you could control the straights with a little more precision than with a stick..still want to do some testing with other controller configurations though.

As the OP mentions, you'll have to do a lot of tweaking but there are also user created configurations for you to experiment with, it's convenient but had to tell if these people have crazy configurations or if they've, or you've, changed some key bindings that makes the configurations incompatible. I played with an interesting MGSV configuration that had aim,first person sights, AND binoculars all on one trigger. It was a neat experiment to show what the controller can do differently but it would be a bit cumbersome trying to aim down sites at a dude that spotted you and accidentally just be looking at him through the binoculars.

Something that's a major disappointment though, is that the Steam Controller is meant to work in Big Picture Mode and you can't customize the functionality outside of the individual software loaded from Steam, so you could technically use it on your desktop, but you're forced to stick with the controllers default bindings. You can, however, launch non-Steam apps through Steam and use it that way for games outside of Steam.

My opinion of the Controller is kind of a mixed bag. i think it has a lot of potential but i think they have a lot of work to do before it's for everyone. Duel action triggers though, that needs to be a new standard.

Those are my initial thoughts, still experimenting and i'm also hoping Valve is taking a lot of feedback to heart from the early adopters for the official November release.

You guys order it way in advance to get it early? I ordered about a month ago (just the controller).

The touch pad on the controller is a lot better than I would have guessed, very easy to use and intuitive, that was about the only thing I like about it though.

The buttons are very awkwardly placed, I thought that the touchpad would function as a button, but it doesn't seem to, and there isn't any sort of default right or left click on the controller.

I probably just need more time with it, but it didn't seem ready to me.

There is also a lot less to the steam link than I was expecting and that is really my fault, I was expecting something along the lines of the playstation tv, but it's really just a box to stream your pc's screen to another screen in the house and that is all.

You can still open Steam in Big Picture Mode from your desktop PC though, and you can customize the controller configuration through that interface without actually launching the game. You can find it under the "Manage Game" option while in Big Picture Mode.

Yeah. You needed to pre-order it back in June to get into this "Early Access" phase of the launch.

@chaser324: What i meant is the Steam controller doesn't work [doesn't have customization i want] in the Windows desktop. It'll work in the desktop but the functionality is limited and most laptop track pads are a better option.

Also i was testing Geometry wars and i'm finding it a bummer there is no co-ordinance based touch control which would work fine for twin stick shooters but geometry wars refuses to recognize the right stick emulation. A lot of the problems with the Steam Controller could be ironed out if developers want to implement native controller support but i don't see it catching on to be big enough for it.

I feel it's up to Valve to do the Nintendo thing of making a game, or a collection of mini games, to show how this controller could be used to innovate but those dudes don't even make videogames anymore.

How do you mean? the software lets you program the trackpad as a 4 way either by clicking or by touching the pad. The default right/left click is the the digital click at the end of the triggers for me

Yeah. It's primarily just for games. There's nothing stopping you from adding Chrome to Steam as a non-Steam "game", but it might not be the best experience.

Thanks for taking the time to write this up Chaser.

I am pretty interested to hear about it. No real interest in a purchase for me yet, but I find myself using a controller more and more on PC, even for things like shooters, so I see the appeal of this to allow a controller even for slower paced strategy games or RPGs I play too. I figure it will take some time so I'll wait a bit but like I said I appreciate the impressions. Sounds like it will get there.

Wow this is an awesome writeup Chaser!

Do you think the Steam Link is worth it without the Steam Controller?

Definitely. If you want to play gamepad games from your PC in your living room, it's a totally valid choice. At this point, the Steam Controller is really only something you should consider if you also want to play some slower-paced mouse-based games like Civ V, Invisible Inc, or Sim City from your couch.

Very very cool! Thanks for the answer!

probably 60-70% of what I play on Steam are single player controller based Console ports like Metal Gear anyway.

Sounds like this might be perfect for me

I spent some more time with my link and controller today. The Link is perfect over Wifi for games that don't move super fast or require twitch responses. I was having a blast playing FTL from my couch (with which the controller worked beautifully also!)

I honestly thought the controller felt pretty cheap when I pulled it out of the box. I also don't like the feel of the bumpers and triggers. Could just be because I'm not use to it yet and it feels very different from the xbox/playstation controller.

You mentioned the dual monitor thing, which I also experienced. It was always brief though and didn't impact anything yet. I did try and fire up Age of Empires 3 which sort of launches outside of steam, and I was unable to use the steam controller with it. The game wouldn't recognize it as an input for the mouse & keyboard.

Does Steam Link work with other controllers like the DS4?

@mosdl:Yes. The official list of supported controllers from Valve is:

Xbox One or 360 Wired Controller, Xbox 360 Wireless Controller for Windows, Logitech Wireless Gamepad F710, or keyboard and mouse

There are a lot of controllers not on that list that will also work. I've used a Dualshock 4 connected via USB - some people have been able to get it to pair via Bluetooth but it hasn't worked for me at this point.

It's interesting...ok fine, let's unpack that. I love using my Xbox One controller. It's become my default controller of choice moments after it was released. I've never gone back to the 360 controller and the few times I've picked one up it feels heavy and clunky in comparison. That instantaneously upgrade does not necessary exist with the Steam controller. I could go on for hours but I'll break this down to a few bullet points after playing a couple of games for a total of 5-6 hours:

Initial feels:

• Support is spotty.
• The face buttons are far too close together. Playing Rocket League the boost and jump buttons would be missed very often.
• It's not a replacement for FPS games as the right pad is too floaty. Maybe any twitch based games would be difficult.
• I keep hitting the back buttons (near the battery compartment)
• The haptic feedback is awesome.
• The weight (minus batteries) is nearly identical to the xbox one controller.
• Getting batteries out is kinda a pain.
• Having smaller hands the I found the bottom ends sloped upward forcing my hand away from the center. Which lead to the face buttons getting mixed up. While a xboxOne controller slop downward resting the ends into my palm increasing my grip.
• The tapping sound created by using the touch pads is kinda loud.

Reading through my list it sounds like I hate it. But it's not the case. It has some very specific use cases and I don't fall into those categories.

controller looks pretty nice and girthy. am i wrong that i want it a bit bigger, though?

How does the Steam Link handle resolution and scaling? If your desktop renders at higher than 1080 does their scaler add latency?

Valve really needs to push the Gyro more, even if people will go "Lol motion controls sucks, wii hurddurrr" because it is the Gyro that is the one defining feature that actually makes the controller work in FPS.

Right now the gyro is off by default in just about every game (Portal 2 has it on afaik) and is kinda hard to figure out how to turn on since there is no label for it. But man once it is on and you find a good way to trigger it on and off (I like the Portal 2 way of just having it turn on as long as the right thumb is on the touch pad) the controller will blow every other controller out of the water, no sweat. Think splatoon controls.

I played a few rounds of Heroes and Generals (Semi realistic WW2 shooter) and could easily pop off headshots with the garand or run into a room and spam a few rounds of on the guy camping in the corner. Things that feels utterly impossible with joysticks.

Edit: There are so many of these early previews of the controller from gaming sites that try to play CS:GO or similar without the gyro and quickly state that the controller is real bad for shooters when they are not using the real game changer...

@chaser324: Did you enable hardware encoding? It's supposed to vastly improve the framerate and mpeg compression issues and were you trying this over Wi-Fi?

Even after reading all these impressions I still don't know if I want one or not. I'm hearing a lot of negative stuff but then I hear about all the positive stuff which sounds really great.

It definitely seems like it takes getting used to so I'll probably wait a few more weeks until people get more comfortable with it before making a decision.

@colourful_hippie:

I'm running the Steam Link on wifi (802.11n). Seems totally sufficient for me, but that's going to vary a lot depending on the particulars of your setup (distance, walls, wifi interference). Some people have reported having good luck using powerline adapters, so you could consider that if wifi isn't sufficient.

As for the hardware encoding, I have it enabled, but my current PC hardware is actually so old that it can't even take advantage of it (Core 2 Quad and a GTX 550 Ti)...that's why I just bought a bunch of stuff last night to upgrade to an i5 and a GTX 970. Even without the hardware encoding though, I generally haven't had any issues, but I also haven't tried any big graphical powerhouses. So, you can just assume that my initial impressions are a baseline and it will probably perform even better (lower latency, fewer hitches and compression artifacts) with a newer PC.

@chaser324: As for the supported controllers does having a steam link mean you don't need the adapter to use an xbox one controller?

@colourful_hippie: You do need that USB dongle thing to use an Xbox One controller wirelessly (at least I'm assuming it will work once it's released). It works wired right now though.

@chaser324: I realized you have since answered this and appreciate your review. But in your original post you should have said if you were using wireless AC or N. You mention them and then just say "I am playing over wireless". AC is quite a bit faster than N if you are using all 3 channels. And you should really say that as well. If you are going to criticize the video quality you need to be specific about how fast you are getting the video.

@memu: Fair point. I added a little tidbit about my specific setup. My performance was good enough that it didn't really feel like I initially didn't feel like I needed to put a caveat on there. Any latency/compression issues I've had are extremely infrequent and minimal.

To be totally honest, I kinda doubt you'll see all that much advantage with 802.11ac over 802.11n unless you're really pushing the boundaries of the effective range of your wifi. The speed advantage is kinda irrelevant since the Steam Link only uses 30 Mbps max.

You're not wrong, i've been testing the controller with MGSV and once i started using the gyro the precision aiming got better. I'm still testing though, which is my general opinion of the Steam Controller; if you're willing to test and tweak it it's worth it right now, if not then it's not a great "out of box" experience.

So i'm just gonna use this thread as a general update to my controller tests since i dunno if it's worth having an extra thread dedicated to games tested with the Steam Controller.

OlliOlli2 is really good with it so far. i've configured the controller so that the right pad is just one big A button so you're pushing and preforming your landings just by touching the pad. The tricks are also touch enabled on the left pad which means to do a basic trick, you touch one of the four cardinal directions and let go, for more complex tricks you'll be sweeping the pad with your thumb and releasing. So far I've been playing the game exclusively with the Steam Controller and i like it alot. My config is available publicly if you have OlliOlli2.

I plan on testing a few Valve games since, in theory, they should have native control with the SC. I also want to mess with flight sims with FSX and the big test, in my opinion, will be the Arma 3 test as i attempt to make that mess work.

@darko: Correct, it's pretty much steam in big picture mode. So far there's no app store or anything like that, but it does have a web browser built in.

@49th: maybe wait and see if they come out with a second revision of the controller, addressing some problems people have with the controller.

@hypnotoadbrwowrowrow: I feel like a lot of the issues with the controller could actually be corrected through software/firmware updates and better controller configurations without the need for a new hardware revision. It'll be interesting to see how much Valve does between now and the official launch in November.

Yeah the biggest problem with the controller is the software, the setup is fairly unintuitive, especially the gyro, the lack of settings for "default mode" or test area, the lack of predefined settings for the different pads. I should be able to load out a WSAD config for the left touchpad without having to load a complete template and work from there.

The controller also really should have a config interface for the normal steam mode so you could configure it with a mouse and keyboard quickly, using the big screen mode takes forever.

The gyro settings for the controller has a pretty important choice hidden by overlapping buttons (the "Activate with" setting that lets you turn on/off gyro with various actions like touch the pads, hold a grip or bumper) and that this setting does not let you have a trigger as the gyro activator.

And then the biggest problem, not being able to use the controller for non steam games in a good way, sure you can load them through big picture mode but thats hardly ideal.

@chaser324: So for those who have the Link, what are your updated impressions of using the thing for over a week so far? Any specific games that don't work so well with it, etc?

@colourful_hippie: My link actually seems to work pretty well over WiFi now. The first day I hooked it up it ran like garbage but I'm able to play Dark Souls 2 at high streaming quality with barely any noticeable lag or hitching. Only issue I still have is the audio cuts out (only for that game specifically so far).

I still can't really play racing games, which I sort of expected. Though even with a hardwired connection, Dirt Rally still didn't run well.

I'm finding I really like having this thing though. Well worth $50. And for whatever reason I really dig Steam's Big Picture Mode. It's a better UI than the Xbone and PS4 IMO.

I got a Steam Controller and already don't really use it. I've been plugging my Xbone controller into the link with a USB.

Awesome write up, but I think reviewing the box while playing over wifi is not a definitive verdict.

I've actually made several changes to my setup since I gave my initial impressions (in addition to Valve releasing several updates), and I've found things have only gotten better.

There's apparently a bug with how Steam calculates how much bandwidth it's using which can cause it to use significantly less than it should or could. After implementing this workaround, I've noticed far fewer compression artifacts.

I also moved most of my other devices to using my router's 2.4 GHz connection, clearing up the 5 GHz band to be used pretty much exclusively by the Link. This seems to have reduced what little latency I was experiencing even further. Playing something twitchy like Downwell feels a bit better than it did before.

I haven't noticed any game that seem particularly incompatible with the Steam Link. Anything that requires fast reactions is obviously going to be more impacted by any latency that's introduced, even if it is minimal, so depending on how well you're able to dial in your setup to reduce latency, the cut-off for games you think are too heavily impacted to be playable will probably change.

There's still a few weeks until the official launch of the Steam Link and Steam Controller, so I'll continue to keep an eye on the updates that Valve's making and post updates as things change.

Considering how well it works on wi-fi (at least in my specific situation), it's only going to be better over a wired connection. Vinny was very positive about his experience with a Steam Link on a wired connection on last week's Beastcast.

@chaser324: Sounds great, thanks for the update!

It's also worth noting that the new Xbox One wireless dongle does not work with the Steam Link. MS has apparently done something at the hardware level to make it impossible (for the moment at least) to get it working anywhere except Windows 10.

@chaser324: So I recently got a Steam Link in part thanks to this review you made, thanks for sharing all of this!

I've very happy with it so far! The wireless using 802.11 N works far better than I was expecting. I had it lose sync once in about 20 hours of gaming with it so far. No fps stutters, latency or artifacts that I noticed.

I've only had issues with 2 games so far and both seemed to be related to controller input issues (I'm using a wired 360 controller atm). For some reason Ultra Street Fighter IV doesn't seem to want to let me hit start/Next/etc to accept another match several times, but otherwise seemed fine where it counted and Rocket League had a similar issue letting me into the main menu. Oddly enough both worked fine and were responsive in match. From what I can tell looking at reddit and such, for whatever select titles like Rocket League and Fallout 4 have some weird quirky issues with the Link but not the ones you'd expect.

I still need to stress Test with something like a Need for Speed like you did, but it certainly works well enough that I can comfortably play probably 75-80% of my controller based games in my library.

But yeah so far, surprisingly great!

For what it's worth, I got a Steam Link for Christmas and the experience has been mostly positive. That said, I'm in the ideal situation where my entire house is wired.

So far, I've had good luck with Crypt of the Necrodancer, Book of Unwritten Tales, Bioshock Infinite (although I was experiencing some unrelated crashes to a Direct X issue), Her Story, and a couple of other things I tried out. Saints Row 4 won't launch for some reason. I need to look into it. Fallout 4 wouldn't launch either.

I also appreciate having three USB ports so I can run a bluetooth keyboard, mouse, and plug in my XBox One controller as well via a USB cable. I tried to get my 360 dongle to work on it, but wasn't having much luck.