I missed having Xbox Remote Play on my ROG Ally — but then I found my Steam Deck can do it even better

It's been almost a year since I first wrote about how using an ROG Ally X for Xbox Remote Play changed how I use my handheld. Around the same time I tried, briefly, an app that could do the same on the Steam Deck.

I didn't go any further with it, partly because it was a paid app, and partly because I eventually pulled the trigger on an ROG Ally.

My ROG Ally since died, and eventually I started to miss Xbox Remote Play again, so I went back, got the Steam Deck app, and jumped in with both feet. Now I'm just left wondering what took me so long, because on the Steam Deck, with this app, it's even better.

XBPlay is a phenomenal app to use on the Steam Deck

XBPlay is a paid app, but it's not too expensive, and you do get a trial period you can use to evaluate it for free. It's also not completely designed for the Steam Deck, you can tell it was built originally for keyboard and mouse with some of the menus. But it works just fine either using the trackpads or the touch display.

There are a bunch of settings you can play with, not all of which are useful on the Steam Deck. The real killer is adding sharpening to the visuals. You're not able to use FSR since, unless you really hate yourself, your Xbox native resolution will be higher than that of the Steam Deck's display.

But you can apply a sharpener, which, at least to my eyes, makes the difference over the native Windows remote play you'd get on the ROG Ally. XBPlay also allows you to run a side-by-side comparison with sharpener and without, and on my network, it's definitely a decent improvement with.

Beyond the sharpening, though, I think it's actually more reliable. Whatever I've used Xbox Remote Play on when it comes to the built-in feature, I've fought with network buffering and reduced visual clarity. My network isn't anything fancy, but I have Wi-Fi 6E mesh covering the house.

But with XBPlay now in three weeks of pretty heavy use, it hasn't struggled once. Sharpener aside, the stability and clarity do seem to be better. I don't have an ROG Ally anymore, but trying remote play from a Windows laptop in the same spot in the house, XBPlay on my Steam Deck is always better.

Which itself is nothing short of remarkable, because the Wi-Fi hardware in the Steam Deck is, well, worse, than that in the ROG Ally or the laptops I have. I wish I could come up with an answer as to why a third-party solution seems to perform better, but I can't. I'm not smart enough, for one.

XBPlay is so good that I'm actually leaning towards using it on my Windows machines over the built-in remote play.

Cloud gaming also needs a shout-out because XBPlay is superb for that, too. It doesn't just open a web view, instead it pulls the games into its own UI and launches them that way.

What I really like is that XBPlay lets you add Xbox cloud games to your Steam library. It'll apply the relevant artwork and add a shortcut into the non-Steam part of your library on the Steam Deck. From here you just launch into it like any other game.

It's just another little touch that makes it such a great app to use.

I use a handheld for remote play more now than ever before

The Steam Deck is an awesome handheld and I love it dearly. But it's limited in its power, and it's now three years old while games are getting, on the whole, more demanding. While playing locally is fine when I'm out of the house, or something less demanding, increasingly I'm leaning on remote play.

It's especially useful right now in the brief, but hot, British summer, where I don't want to be in my office any more than absolutely necessary. Instead of baking while sitting at my gaming PC or my Xbox, I can be on the sofa downstairs, in the much cooler front room and play games from either using my Steam Deck.

Toss in the cloud, and of late I've probably been playing more games not stored on my Steam Deck, than are. But I still couldn't go to something like the Logitech G Cloud or the Razer Edge, because I do sometimes leave the house. I can still play Spider-Man on a Steam Deck.

Using XBPlay now means there's only a single feature on a Windows handheld that I can't have; Xbox Game Pass. But at least I can stream Game Pass games when I'm at home.

You can grab XBPlay right now from Steam for $6.99. There's so much more in this app that I haven't scratched the surface of yet, but even just for the basics, it's the best thing I've bought for my Steam Deck.