Add the Remote Play Together to Multiplayer types

[Joshua Haley 0]

  On 10/10/2019 at 8:42 AM, Andytizer said:

Steam are releasing a new Remote Play Together streaming option. This will allow one Steam user to stream their game with another remote Steam user, and for them to play the same 'local' game together.

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I specifically registered on this forum to ask to specify in the "Network" / "Multiplayer types" block / table the presence of Steam Remote Play Together (RPT) in the game. Currently, there are three modes specified there: "Local play" (incl. hotseat), "LAN play" (incl. serial connection) and "Online play".

When "Nucleus Co-op" is specified as a special case of "Local play", it is fair, because from the user's point of view it is "Local play" regardless of what the mode was originally and how exactly it was implemented. Similarly, it seems to me that since RPT requires online, it is logical to specify it in the notes field of the "Online play" line (despite the fact that after establishing a connection between users, data can only be transmitted over a local network).

[Aemony 144]

Steam Remote Play Together is essentially a separate technology that enables using "local play" over the internet through the fact that it streams gameplay and input do a separate computer.

Adding such a row would therefor not really be useful since it would be the same as the local play state.

[Joshua Haley 0]

  On 8/5/2024 at 7:51 PM, Aemony said:

Steam Remote Play Together is essentially a separate technology that enables using "local play" over the internet through the fact that it streams gameplay and input do a separate computer.

Adding such a row would therefor not really be useful since it would be the same as the local play state.

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From the players' point of view, it doesn't make much difference what technology the multiplayer is built on. If those who want to play together have only one computer, or a large TV with a sofa, then they search for games by the parameters "Shared/Split Screen" / "Hotseat". If they have two computers, but no TV, and they live together, it makes sense to first search for games by the filters "LAN PvP", "LAN Co-op" (to minimize lag). If they live far from each other, or are looking for partners for co-op play, then the filters "Online PvP" and "Online Co-op" are used. You propose not to specify the ability to play together on more than one computer as a separate parameter for use in advanced search. That is, to make the game appear only when the filter "Shared/Split Screen" is selected. What is the advantage for players and researchers of such a solution versus the decision to make RPT a separate parameter?

NB. At the moment, out of 7,285 games with local multiplayer on Steam, only 6,254 support RPT. That's 85%. Most, but not all.

[Aemony 144]

I'm not following at all, to be honest. Most users wanting information about Steam's Remote Play Together feature are best served either looking that up on Steam itself, or just redirected to PCGW's "local coop" page, with a note that all Steam's feature does is enable the use of built-in local coop across a network. It's not worth tracking it separately on PCGW since very few editors will actually test for that kind of thing when filling out our articles.

The various mismatches that exists, where a game has local coop but does not support Steam's Remote Play Together, is basically down to compatibility issues with Steam's overlay/streaming functionality. But even in those situations a user might e.g. use Parsec to achieve the same end goal.

Ergo, instead of tracking Parsec and Steam Remote Play Together (and any other alternate such third-party feature that might exist) separately across all game articles, it's better to just educate users properly and refer them to the services' respective information pages, etc.

Also, note that PCGW does not generally concern itself with third-party tool's support for games on our game pages. We have made a few limited exceptions (e.g. VorpX, which is the only specific one I can think of right now), but our game articles are actually intended to be about the games themselves and not any potential compatibility with generic third-party tools that might exist. This is why we don't cover ReShade, Special K, RTSS, etc compatibility on any of our articles, nor more general-purpose tools such as Discord's/Steam's/Action's/Nvidia's/AMD's etc recording and/or streaming functionalities, or anything like that.

Our Steam Input coverage on the articles, for example, refers to whether the game itself uses Steam Input in an official capacity, and if so how it uses it. It does not concern itself with whether the Steam Input feature supports the game, which it pretty much always the case.

This sort of key distinction is also why we don't cover generic HDR retrofitting support (Special K HDR, Auto HDR, Nvidia RTX HDR, ReShade HDR, xxx HDR, etc) on articles either -- we only cover game-specific HDR retrofitting mods, and for all generic solutions we refer (link) people to our HDR glossary page where all typical generic third-party solutions are covered.

It is an important separation we make for the game articles to strike the most useful balance to our visitors. If we ignored this and just randomly tracked all sorts of compatibility with all kinds of third-party tools, our articles would just end up being a massive compatibility database for third-party tools with little to no focus on the game itself and its native support, features, and capabilities.