Steam vs Sunshine

Steam is an online destination for playing, discussing, and creating games. Its catalog includes nearly 30,000 games, with game hubs, reviews, achievements, and custom recommendations for discovery. Users can meet others, join groups, form clans, and use text or voice chat. Steam Workshop supports making, finding, and downloading mods and cosmetics for nearly 1,000 supported games. Steam Broadcast streams gameplay live to friends or the community. The Steam Mobile app on iOS and Android supports shopping, account protection, game news, notifications, and community features; Steam Guard can approve sign-ins and confirm trades or Community Market listings. Steamworks provides tools and services for developers and publishers distributing games on Steam. Steam is free, but game and content prices vary and some subscriptions may be free. Content is licensed rather than sold; use may require an account, the client, and an internet connection. Users under 13 may not subscribe, and country-specific age limits may also apply.

Sunshine is a free, self-hosted game-streaming host for Moonlight clients, running on your own hardware. It supports AMD, Intel, and Nvidia hardware encoding, with software encoding also available. A web interface lets you configure the host and pair clients from a browser, including on mobile devices. Moonlight clients are listed for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, Xbox, and more. Sunshine emulates Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series, DualShock 4, DualSense, and Nintendo Switch Pro controllers. Host compatibility includes FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, and Windows, with features varying by system. Listed maximums are 4K resolution and 120 fps. Minimum requirements include 4 GB RAM, a supported GPU, and 5 GHz 802.11ac networks for host and client. Sunshine is GPL-3.0 licensed and distributed through several package sources.