You can’t be a gamer and don’t know about Steam. Developed by Valve, Steam was released in 2003, and, by 2013, it already had 75% of the market share of all games played and bought; by 2012, it had 250 employees and was worth about 3 billion dollars. That’s a good ratio, if not the best. Because many companies are worth a lot, but also have a lot of employees, like for example Apple, which has 147,000 people on the payroll. Also, it is available in 28 languages. Let us know about ‘Steam on Roku’.
Steam and China
There’s even Steam China. I mean, China. China has very strict regulations about video games and internet use. There, it is not like in the west, where once you are eighteen, you can basically watch everything you like. And they have it there. Albeit there have been problems and controversies, they usually solve them.
Valve
And Valve, its father or mother or both, whichever way you prefer, was founded in 1996, by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. They (Valve) are the creators of such games as Dota 2. Dota 2 is one of the most exciting MOBAs out there. Not as successful as League of Legends, but pretty successful.
Roku
Roku it’s also a game-changer. Created in 2008, streaming TV devices are a bit younger than videogames, Roku has also established itself as the main source of streaming TV shows or sports in your television. No wonder people want to mix it up with their video games now. Boy, wouldn’t that be the ultimate thing? TV and video games, all on the same screen. But you can’t. Alright, you do can, but with your PC screen, not TV. Usually, TV screens are better, though.
Does Steam work on Roku?
Now, if you are a gamer, you want to have a big screen to play at full power your video game. This is why many people have tried to use Steam on their Roku. However, this is not recommended.
For example, here is what a Reddit user posted three years ago: So, I connected my Roku TV and successfully mirrored my PC (Win 10 OS) to the Roku TV. Unfortunately, when doing actions on the Roku screen, there is an obvious delay.
And that is the problem, there is a delay in the connection. However, if you want to try it anyway, remember you need the Steam Link STB to make the connection. You put it as a receiver first. But, it will most certainly lag.
Also, not that Amazon Fire TV does support this application.
The competition
Steam became so successful, that there are many attempts to slow it down. For example, Epic Games arranged that the latest game of the Assassin’s Creed Saga, Valhalla, was only released on their platform, and not on Steam. This meant that to play the game, you had to download Epic Games software first, in case you didn’t have it. Are these efforts successful? Time will tell. But it goes to tell you, how big Steam really is. In fact, as of this moment, there are more than 23 million people connected to Steam. And almost 6 million playing a game. Yes, take it all in, slowly.
Discounts
Steam has weeks or days of promotions. That means that during that time, a lot of games are at a discount. So, if there is a game you want to play, but you find it too expensive, all you have to do is wait for the right time to buy it. On the other hand, if there’s a game you like and you have the money, you don’t have to wait a bit.
Just recently, Steam announced the acquisition of God of War. God of War was exclusive of PlayStation. But somehow, it is on Steam now. Maybe they just wanted a bigger audience, go figure. Because there are games that have exclusives with certain consoles; so, for example, if they come out in PlayStation, you have to have a PlayStation to play that game, otherwise, you can’t. Can you picture a scenario where you could just play all games on all consoles no matter what? I don’t know, maybe we need the control, but maybe we don’t.
Conclusion
Roku is not designed to use Steam at the moment. You can, however, stream your PC to a TV, with an HMDI cable and play your games there.
