Can I play my own PC instead of paying for cloud gaming?

You already own a gaming PC and hundreds of games, and a cloud service asks for a monthly fee to play a catalogue that may or may not include them, at a quality tier that depends on the plan, through a queue when it is busy.

What you actually want is to play your PC from the sofa, the bed or a hotel — not somebody else’s PC in a data centre.

The do-it-yourself route works but asks for router rules, PINs and a virtual display set up by hand, which is why the subscription looked tempting in the first place.

Cloud gaming rents you a remote PC and streams it; the technology is the same as streaming your own, minus the rent. What made self-hosting hard was everything around the stream: reaching the PC from outside, matching the phone’s screen, getting the controller recognised, surviving a Wi-Fi blip.

ChimpDeck removes those steps. Pairing is a matching number, the PC learns the device’s exact size, the controller is forwarded as the real USB device, the meeting point opens a direct path away from home, and a drop pauses the session instead of ending it. Your PC does the rendering; nothing of yours passes through anyone’s servers.

1. 01

   Install both halves

   ChimpDeck on the phone, tablet or TV box (Android 8.0+, hardware H.264/HEVC decoder); ChimpDeck for Windows on the PC (Windows 10/11, NVIDIA graphics card today — AMD and Intel encoding coming soon). No account anywhere.

2. 02

   Pair once, at home

   A six-digit number on both screens, accept, done. Add games or launchers with box art on the PC and they appear in the device’s list; the Desktop is always there — any store, any mod, any save.

3. 03

   Play at the device’s exact resolution

   The host learns the screen’s size at pairing and serves it on a virtual display, then removes it after. With a clip-on pad the phone is a handheld for your library.

4. 04

   Take it out of the house

   On 4G, 5G or hotel Wi-Fi the app finds the PC through the meeting point and opens a direct path — no port forwarding, no VPN, no account. Quality adapts live; a drop pauses the session for up to 10 minutes.

5. 05

   Keep it private

   Video, audio and inputs travel directly between your device and your PC; the meeting point sees identities and addresses only — what is protected and where it goes.

6. 06

   Decide about the Pass later

   Every feature is in the free tier, with a per-session play-time limit. The Non Stop Pass (€4.99 + VAT a month, or €39.99 + VAT for life) removes the limit; the monthly one exists so you never have to bet on the lifetime one first.

• Your whole library

  Every store, every mod, every save, at your PC’s settings — no catalogue.

• No queue, no tier

  Your GPU renders for you alone; quality is what your PC and your link can do.

• Your PC, your privacy

  Nothing of yours passes through ChimpDeck’s servers on the normal path.

• A price that is a choice

  Free with a session clock; €4.99 + VAT a month or €39.99 + VAT once to remove it. Nothing else is held back.