14 DAY TRIAL // Valve’s Steam is pretty much dead, and the company revealed that it’s no longer making that hardware, but the project will live on through the community and with the help of the Raspberry Pi project.
Steam tried to take over the living room without actually making a console, with the famous and now dead Link. It’s a small piece of hardware that connects to a TV, allowing users to stream content from a PC somewhere in the house, trough the LAN network.
Furthermore, Steam Link allowed users to connect up to four controllers, which made it basically a small console. For some weird reason, this small and really cheap device didn’t take off. And now Valve is no longer making them.
It lives through the Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi 3 B+
Surprisingly enough, it looks like the latest two Raspberry 3 mini-PCs are more than capable of replacing the Steam Link. Their hardware capability is not all that different, and with the right people working on the project, they could easily take over.
Valve’s Sam Lantinga announced on the official forums that they Steam Link app is now available for Raspberry Pi 3 and 3 B+ running Raspbian Stretch.
Users just need to run the following from a command line:
curl -#Of http://media.steampowered.com/steamlink/rpi/steamlink_1.0.5_armhf.deb
sudo dpkg -i steamlink_1.0.5_armhf.deb
After the process has been completed, you can start the app either from the Games menu or by running the following from the command line:
steamlink
Of course, the full version is going to be downloaded, and a shortcut is going to be made available. Please keep in mind that this is a Beta version and that bugs might still be preset (most likely). You can report any problems on the official forums, which would make the experience more stable and fun for everyone.