NVIDIA Shield Is Pulling The Plug On Its GameStream Feature, What You Should Know

PC gaming is  fun but can be a bit restrictive. Most PC games must naturally be played on a PC. It can be challenging for an entire household to play together, especially in one room. In-home game streaming has definitely made playing your PC games from the comfort of your couch easier. However, NVIDIA has decided to pull the plug on its support for the GameStream service on their popular set-top Android hardware, the NVIDIA Shield.

The NVIDIA Shield was admittedly a little pricey at launch. Nevertheless, one of the key selling points was the idea that you could, wired or wirelessly, play your PC games on it. This was only possible if you had the right NVIDIA GPU and drivers on your computer to support it. Some complained of framerate drops, latency, unreliability, but in most of these cases it was usually related to people's home network configuration. While it worked wirelessly, a wired connection did work best. The selling point therefore had a pretty big asterisk next to it as users needed to know their network's limitations.


The announcement goes on to point out that GeForce NOW, NVIDIA's cloud gaming offering, will continue to work on the device. Users are also advised they can also still use the Steam Link Android app for their NVIDIA shield. This would allow people to still play games from their Steam library.

As of right now, the Steam Link software works fairly well and the Steam controller interface is pretty easy to use overall. You can continue to browse your desktop games, if you wish. You can even add non-Steam games to your Steam Library. However, there is no guarantee the Link app will work with those. 


GeForce NOW and Steam Link are not the only ways for your game streaming fix to live on. For example, AMD's Adrenalin drivers still support its AMD Link functionality, if you have a card from team red. There is also the open source alternative, Moonlight, which uses an implementation of the GameStream protocol. This should continue to work as GameStream functionality in the desktop drivers have no indication of removal yet.