This is noteworthy for one important reason: you don’t have to set anything up. It’s just there. It just, seemingly, works. And, unlike other, dedicated streaming solutions like Twitch and Hitbox, Steam’s streaming is intelligent, only actually actively broadcasting when someone shows up and clicks the “Watch Game” button. This means that you can enjoy full performance when no-one is watching — streaming can cause a slight hit to graphics performance in some games — but seamlessly start sharing what you’re playing with friends without having to do anything, and without compromising the experience with tiny windows, huge chatboxes and all manner of other rubbish.

This, to me, is the optimum solution for streaming — at least for me. It wouldn’t work particularly well for professional streamers or those who run to more of a schedule, but for more casual players who simply want to use streaming as a means of showing other people what a game is like, it’s absolutely ideal. I mean it when I said there was absolutely no setting up required, too: no buggering around with encoding, no worrying about bitrates, no creating application sessions or whatever. It just, as they say, works.

I’m still not the sort of person who will sit down and watch a scheduled stream of someone else playing a game — I’d much rather spend my time playing games myself — but that’s not really what Steam’s broadcasting system is for. Instead, as I noted above, its ideal functionality is for demonstrating games to one another, and pleasingly, it works with anything you run through the Steam client, not just games sold via Steam’s storefront. In other words, any game that you’ve added to Steam via the “Add Non-Steam Game…” option in the menu — and which supports the Steam overlay, allowing you access to your friends list and chat functionality in-game — can be easily broadcasted using the new functionality.

But don’t worry; if you’re concerned about your lack of skills being shown off to the world and everyone showing up to laugh at you, you do have control over who can watch you. The first time someone requests to watch your game, you have several options — broadcast openly to anyone who wants to watch; broadcast to friends; or don’t broadcast at all.

So far the only thing missing from the functionality seems to be some sort of record or archive function, though with the system’s seemingly intended use as described above, I’m not sure we’ll get that. I’m not too worried, though; I doubt there are many people who would want to watch three hours of prerecorded video of me grinding for my Relic Nexus weapon in Final Fantasy XIV — though there may be some people who have seen me playing it and are interested in taking a look for a few minutes just to see how it plays, as my friend Bowley did this evening.

I’m quietly impressed with the system, then; it’ll be interesting to see how much it gets used once it rolls out into the Steam client proper.