Steam Hardware

I was in your position. I have to say the ideal solution has been: I just put Bazzite on my PC and moved it to the lounge as a console PC. No streaming required.

If you're a first person shooter pro then you might want the PC at the desk for KB+M control. Otherwise for other games (like strategy games) it is better to stream from lounge to PC for those few games and have the native PC experience with the TV.

I mostly use my desk PC for work, and any cheap old PC can do this. I got a basic mini PC workstation pretty cheap, and this OS actually good enough to play most indie and emulated games natively at 144 FPS anyway. Something even older and cheaper would be perfectly fine for my workstation needs.

I streamed Expedition 33 to my deck when it was my shift during the night to look after our newborn whilst they were sleeping.

Honestly can't remember much of it since that period of time was a blur, but what I do know is the streaming worked great, although I had to change a couple of settings as games would sometimes freeze. I think it was something to do with the encoding and decoding, so you may have to look at that if you have the same issue.

Vampire Survivors

Slay the Spire

Children of Morta

Dead Cells

Here's a suggestion that doesn't even begin to address your question, have you considered a long HDMI cable to connect your TV in your lounge to your PC directly? Best of both worlds, comfortable seat in front of the TV, no input delay, play anything your PC can handle without middlemaning through the deck.

Steam has a list of games that are "Controller Friendly". I mean the Library view in Steam client, next to "All Games" list. On your Steam Deck it lists games that are verified for Steam Deck, but on PC client it lists games that are Controller friendly in general.

You can create a custom Collection for that too, a list that is available on all systems you log in. Go to "All Games" view, click "Fliter" (or X button), scroll down to "Hardware support" and enable filter "Full Controller Support". Scroll down and click "Save as Dynamic Collection". Name it and save it. Now this is a dymanic collection, which means it will automatically expand with new added games that fit this criteria. I would say all games from this list should fit your requirement and use case of being playable with a gamepad.

I don't play much, but if I do I pretty much exclusively use the deck or a controller... I don't think there are many games that don't support controllers, so I guess you could just check your favourite ones and see if they work well?

Games that I enjoyed on the couch more than on mobile or on the PC:

• tetris connected. It's tetris, all right, but with lights and sound! Works so much better on a large screen and a sound sound system.
• redout (2). It's a fast antigrav racer, bit like wip3out. Music of the first and sind effects and graphics of the second just work better in a home theater. Two stick controls are awesome.
• hellblade, if you have a surround sound system.

Apart from that, there are the usual suspects: 3rd person console ports (horizon, Batman etc) or couch coop games if you have some friends over (Bumerang fu, lovers in a dangerous space time etc).

Currently using sunshine/moonlight to my Rog Ally for Dawnwalker. I also use my Xbox with moonlight to stream occasionally. Just about any Unreal engine game runs rough on handhelds due to stuttering, so I use my desktop and stream it. The vast majority of the games I play work great with a controller.

Megabonk

In my time I have found that as long as the game isn't terrible controls, and isn't extremely latency dependent (you could try enabling Pyrowave codec in steams streaming or try Sunshine to bypass steams streaming) then the real limitation is being able to see the menus from the couch! Lots of modern games get this right, especially if they already have console ports, but sometimes you just can't read the stinking menus!

Your TV might have the Steam Link app meaning you could stream directly without needing the deck in the loop. If the TV is connected via Ethernet then latency would be even better.

This was the exact set up I used to play Death Stranding 2

When I was injured civ 6 on a controller was a great time to just sit and play and enjoy.

weeeell... what games do you want to play?