By I’ve spent a fair bit of time looking for good ways to stream PS5 games onto my Steam Deck without owning an actual PS5, and a new app called Asobi Remote Play might be the easiest one I’ve tried yet. It’s live on the Steam store right now as a free playtest, and I wanted to walk through what it’s like to set up and actually play with.
Getting Set Up
Getting the app is as simple as searching for it on the Steam store and hitting install. Right now there’s a pretty long wait list, so you’ll need to join it and wait for an email invite before you can actually launch it. Once you’re in, downloading and opening it is the easy part.
From there, it asks you to sync your PSN ID, which needs a mobile phone with the PSN app installed. The neat part is that you can buy games directly through that PSN app on your phone, so you genuinely never need to touch a physical PS5 at any point. Once everything’s synced, your purchased library shows up right inside Asobi, ready to stream.
Streaming My PS5 Library
I loaded up a couple of games I own, Astro Bot and Ghost of Yotei, and clicking play boots you straight into the game, no extra setup needed. The stream quality genuinely surprised me. There’s some latency, sure, but it’s mild enough that it never got in the way of actually playing.
One detail I really liked is that Asobi maps the Steam Deck’s trackpad to the DualSense’s own trackpad, so any of those PS5-exclusive trackpad features still work exactly as intended. It’s a small thing, but it’s the kind of detail that makes the whole experience feel less like a workaround and more like the real thing.
Free vs. Premium
Asobi is built around a free and premium tier, but since it’s still in its Steam playtest and the premium tier hasn’t officially launched yet, everything is currently unlocked for free. That means HDR, FSR upscaling up to 4K, and streaming at 1080p, 2K, or 4K are all available right now at no cost. On my Steam Deck specifically, it’s running at 720p HD, 60fps, with HDR frame generation, which honestly looks great on the Deck’s screen. Whenever the premium tier does go live, I’d expect most of what’s free today to end up gated behind it, so it’s worth trying now while it’s all open.
How It Compares to Pylux
I’ve covered a similar app called Pylux before, and the two are a lot alike under the hood. The big difference is how you get them installed. Pylux runs through the Discover store or a command-line script from its GitHub page, while Asobi lives directly in the Steam store itself, which makes it noticeably easier to get up and running, closer to how the original PSStream app worked before it disappeared from Steam.
Overall, I’m really enjoying Asobi Remote Play so far. It’s an easy way to get your PS5 library running on the Steam Deck without needing the console itself, and having it sit right in the Steam store makes it far more approachable than the alternatives I’ve tried. Let me know what you think of it in the comments below.