How to Play Local Co-op Games Online

If you are both on PC, use Steam Remote Play Together - it is free, the friend does not need to own the game, and it works on games with no online mode at all

The verdict first: a couch co-op game can be played with a friend in another city, and on PC the tool for it is built into Steam and costs nothing. Valve's own page describes Remote Play Together as a way to “play local multiplayer games with Steam Friends online, even when the game doesn't natively support online play”, with “one player owns and runs the game” and “up to four players - or even more with fast connections - can quickly join in the fun”. That is the whole pitch, and for a LEGO game or a Rayman or a beat-em-up it is the difference between the disc sitting on a shelf and a Tuesday evening.

On a PS5 the equivalent is Share Play, and it is a meaningfully smaller feature: Sony's support page says a session “lasts for one hour and automatically ends one hour after the visitor joins”, that you can use it “with only one visitor at a time”, and that for the mode where you actually play together “both the host and visitor need to be PlayStation Plus members”. It is a demo-length tool, not an evening. On Xbox there is no comparable first-party feature to point you at, so an Xbox household ends up either buying a game that has a real online mode or moving the whole plan to PC.

Read this first: which of the three tools you need is decided by hardware, not preference

Steam Remote Play Together - two or more PCs.Free, built into the Steam client, and the only one of the three with no time limit stated on its own page. The host launches the game and invites a Steam friend; the friend's machine shows a video stream of the host's game and sends their controller input back. Valve states it as “cross-platform play, even when the game doesn't natively support mobile devices or the other players' operating systems”, and says a friend can join from a phone or tablet through the Steam Chat and Steam Link apps while “on the go”. The one hard exclusion Valve publishes: “Remote Play Together is not supported for VR.”

PS5 Share Play - two PlayStation consoles, one hour at a time.Both people need PlayStation Plus for the play-together mode, only one visitor can join, and the clock stops the session after sixty minutes. Sony does say the visitor can “enjoy the game regardless of who owns it”, which is the useful half, and that the visitor is blocked if the game is not sold in their region or if their account is under the game's age rating. Treat it as a way to let a friend try your copy, not as a way to finish a campaign together.

Parsec and the other streaming tools - PC, when Steam is not an option. Games bought outside Steam have no Remote Play Together to use, so the fallback is a general-purpose low-latency desktop stream. It is more setup, it is not endorsed by the game's publisher, and the quality depends entirely on the host's upload speed. We are not going to pretend it is as simple as clicking an invite in Steam, because it is not.

The one thing every version of this has in common: it is a video stream

Nobody is running the game on their own machine. One computer runs it and everyone else is watching a compressed video of it and pressing buttons at the far end. Two consequences follow from that, and they decide whether this works for your group. The first is that the host'supload connection carries the whole session, so a household with weak upload is the bottleneck no matter how good the guest's internet is - the same arithmetic our bad internet guide works through for ordinary online play. The second is input lag: every button press travels to the host and the picture travels back. A LEGO level, a cooking game, a physics puzzle - all fine. A fighting game or anything built on frame-perfect timing is not, and no amount of fiddling fixes it.

Who should ignore all of this and just buy a game with online co-op

If the group is three or four people in three or four cities and you want this to be a regular thing, streaming one host's screen to everybody is the fragile way to do it. Buy something with a real online mode instead - co-op campaign games and the crossplay hub both exist for exactly this group. The picks below are specifically for the other case: a game you already own or want to own that has no online mode, played with one or two people who are not in the room.

Setting up Steam Remote Play Together, start to finish

One person - whoever has the game and the better upload - is the host. They launch the game, open the Steam overlay with Shift+Tab, find the friend in the friends list and choose Remote Play Together. The friend accepts and a window opens on their machine showing the host's game. From there it behaves like two controllers plugged into one PC, because as far as the game is concerned that is exactly what it is: the guest's pad is registered as player two on the host's machine.

Three settings are worth knowing before the first session. The host can choose whether the guest gets keyboard and mouse access as well as a controller - Valve makes that optional, and for a pad-driven game there is no reason to hand it over. The host's Steam only shows the game window, not the whole desktop. And the host can lower the streaming resolution if the connection is struggling, which is almost always the right first fix when the picture breaks up rather than buying anything.

What this costs, against the alternatives

Nothing, on PC, beyond the one copy of the game. That is the part worth sitting with. A co-op game that normally costs two copies to play online costs one copy here, which puts it in the same economics as the games where only one person has to buy it - a list this page effectively extends to the entire local co-op catalogue on Steam. On PS5 the cost is two PlayStation Plus memberships and a one-hour ceiling, which is a much worse deal; our free vs paid multiplayer breakdown has the full sum for console subscriptions.

Picking the right game for a streamed session

Four properties make a local co-op game work well over a stream, and the picks above were chosen against them. Forgiving timing - a half-second of lag must not lose you the level. A shared camera - split-screen games stream fine, but a game where both players share one screen wastes no bandwidth on a second viewport. Readable at a lower resolution - chunky, high-contrast art survives compression; a dark, detailed horror game does not. Short levels - something you can stop at the end of, because a streamed session will eventually drop.

The LEGO games score well on all four, which is why two of them lead the list and why the question of LEGO games onlinehas its own page - they are the single most-asked-about couch-only co-op series there is. Rayman Legends and TMNT: Shredder's Revenge are the same shape: flat, bright, side-on, and impossible to misread at a lower bitrate - and Shredder's Revenge is the one that stretches furthest, because its listings run to six players, so one host's copy can cover a whole group rather than a pair.

Where to go next

If the plan is actually two people in the same room, you do not need any of this - split-screen games on PC and couch co-op are the pages for that, and they are better reading. If the plan is a whole group spread across cities, the long-distance hub and playing over Discord cover the setups that scale past two people. And if you are deciding what to buy rather than how to connect, the two-player list is the shopping page.