A home PC seems like a completely personal thing until a teenager shows up at home with motivation and a free evening. Then it turns out that your video card lives its own night life, and someone else is exploring Night City.
One of the players noticed that the desktop PC was turned on every morning, although in the evening it was definitely sent to sleep. I looked into the Windows event logs, expecting to find some program that would wake up the system, and found my little brother.
He received an old laptop as a gift a few months ago, figured out Steam Remote Play, logged into the older man’s account and calmly streamed for three weeks Cyberpunk 2077 to my room, and one day I forgot to close Elden Ring on the host.
The rendering takes place entirely on desktop hardware, the client gets a compressed video stream and input postback. For the first setup, you had to physically approach the host once and enter a four-digit pairing code, and then the Steam Link application can itself wake up a sleeping PC over the local network via Wake-on-LAN.
It’s especially interesting that the scheme generally worked for three weeks without any complaints, because the reputation of streaming over a home network was so-so. Anyone who tried Remote Play in 2019 remembers the soapy, input lags and the sound falling apart; now people play it even from another city.
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The key condition is a wired connection at least on one end and an unloaded router, because traffic is processed sequentially, and a dozen devices hanging on the network significantly spoil the picture.
An account password, Win+L lock and two-factor authentication on Steam would have closed this loophole in a minute, but the story is that the teenager found it faster than the owner of the hardware remembered the existence of such settings.
My brother is saving money for his own PC. This three-week flawless disguise looks like an application for a future career in systems administration.
