By now, most people are familiar with cloud gaming, otherwise known as game streaming. Servers owned by the companies run the games and stream the gameplay over the internet to your device. The Moonlight gaming tool is a lot like these services, but your gaming rig acts as the server.
As mentioned already, Moonlight is a program that allows you to stream games over the internet from your gaming PC to your phone, tablet, laptop, or TV. Assuming you have fast enough internet connections for both the host and the client, you can play your PC games anywhere — even if your gaming rig is physically miles away. Instead of streaming games from Google’s or Amazon’s servers, you stream from your gaming PC. And, instead of paying Google or Amazon to buy games and stream the content, you can stream the games you already own as much as you like for free. Plus, you can stream any game, not just the one’s Google, Amazon, or Microsoft offer.
Moonlight is free and open-source, so you can install it on as many systems as you like without any cost. If you’re a software developer, you can even contribute to the further development of Moonlight.
If you’re a fan of Steam, you probably know Valve has its app for streaming your Steam library. This app is called Steam Link and is inspired by the discontinued Steam Link hardware. Steam Link is available for free on a multitude of platforms (including Android). Like the Moonlight gaming tool, it allows you to use your gaming rig as a host to stream games to clients.
However, Steam Link has two major problems. The first is, quite obviously, that it’s designed to stream Steam games. If you buy your games through other methods, the Steam Link app will require you to “install” the game through Steam. While this is straightforward to do, it sometimes results in poor streaming.
The other obstacle is that sometimes it won’t let you stream certain Steam games, either. Even if it’s a Steam game that works fine on your rig, some games will present with a black screen when you fire them up in Steam Link. This can be due to DRM issues.
In other words, Steam Link is a useful tool if you are primarily a Steam user and the games you want to play are supported. The benefit of the Moonlight gaming tool is that both of these limitations are gone. You can stream any game you want from any source. As long as it’s installed on your host PC, you can play it on any of your clients.
If you have everything set up correctly, you can fire up the Moonlight app on your client — let’s say, a smartphone. Once the app is opened, you can navigate through your library of games installed back home on your host PC. Just select the game you want to play and, your host PC will open it, and start streaming gameplay to your phone. It’s that simple!
Essentially, Moonlight is just a fancy way of mirroring your gaming PC’s desktop remotely. Using software created by Nvidia, Moonlight streams the visuals from your host PC to the client. Simultaneously, it streams your inputs via a controller or keyboard/mouse back to the PC. This creates an input/response loop.
Assuming your internet connections are fast enough at both points, it should only take milliseconds for your inputs to the client to be received by the host and then the visual response of those inputs to stream back to the client. Naturally, this creates a certain amount of latency or lag. However, if everything is working properly, it should be a small enough latency that you would barely notice.
Still, the Moonlight gaming tool is not going to be very useful for competitive gaming. Single-player games, turn-based RPGs, visual novels, and other games where a millisecond of reaction time isn’t going to make or break your run are better suited to moonlight.
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