One major plus with Steam is buying a single copy of certain games and having a friend join instantly via remote play.

Also nice to be able to buy some new games and run them on an old laptop, can't do that on my xbox 360 anymore. My library all runs on my latest computer too. At least xbox makes a fair amount of the catalog backwards compatible.

edit: plus I can give friends access to my entire library, providing I'm not using it at the time.

Another fun thing about steam: There's no setting for the game developer to enable/disable the networking, so if a steam game uses steamworks and doesn't have multiplayer through steam, it can just be modded in and works great.

Is this the best tool for that?

https://github.com/m4dEngi/RemotePlayWhatever

And monthly online fees?

Or is that only PS?

This is fair, but it's an oddly mixed bag on Playstation for legacy reasons.

Free-to-play games can be played online without a subscription, but paid games require a subscription - I imagine as a holdover from pre-Fortnite days and cross-platform play.

I'm a subscriber for the game catalogue and only really play online multiplayers that are F2P anyway, but yeah it doesn't seem at all justifiable. It's a strange decision too - I can't imagine the subset of people who are NOT subscribers for the monthly games and/or catalogue AND are playing games online that are NOT f2p is big enough to be a significant impact to their bottom line. If anything it would be a deterrent from choosing the platform.