Arr guys,
Recently, I came across an app called GameVault on r/selfhosted and wanted to share it here. It’s like a customized Steam-like platform for games stored on your seedbox or fileserver you can run yourself on your server.
You and your family can then use the Windows app to download them, track your playtime and so on. The idea is pretty neat and like Jellyfin/Kodi but for videogames.
The developers cannot officially promote piracy, so they have a scary disclaimer on their page, but the app works perfectly fine and everything is formulated “tounge in cheek”-ish.
Personally, I have about 25 “alternatively obtained” games on my seedbox-server by now, and it’s working fine for me and my kids.
If you have basic Linux-server knowledge, setting it up is not difficult. For complete beginners, there’s a guide on their website: https://gamevau.lt/docs/intro
Side note: I’m definitely not the dev, and my username is just an anagram for that by coincidence.
I’ve seen it recently, when it was still known as crackpipe.
Unfortunately it’s not (yet?) available on Linux/Docker.
When it becomes so, I’ll want another look at it.
What do you mean? I am running the backend on docker and using this approach to run the client on my linux laptop myself
… well, then I misunderstood something rather completely
I’ll need another look. Thanks!
This is awesome. If only my upload speed wasn’t trash.
Didn’t steam have a feature to add non-steam games to your library? Ofcourse it didn’t support all the steam features + it would allow steam gather data about “less-than-legal” copies of games associated with users 🤷
My dumb ass kid brain put all my “alternatively sourced” games to it thinking I was cool
replied to wrong comment, oops
(The comment previously posted here is now at https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/1259716 )
You can add literally anything, and all Steam does is launch the executable you specify. And maybe take screenshots if you use the overlay.
Valve could actually look through the games people have added and do some sort of major crackdown, but for better or worse they seem to have left this alone. Still, though, I’d consider it a vulnerability, and I also recommend against using Steam because Steam is basically DRM. (Yes, this varies by game and can be argued over. But it still definitely tries to lock you into using it, one way or another.)
There’s also a Lemmy Community !phalcode@lemmy.world
As a guy who has a lot of experience with old emulated Nintendo games and things like that, I keep a bunch of ROMs on a cloud storage service for backup. But all those files add up and eat storage space. For a service like this, do you just have the installers themselves stored for easy installing/uninstalling? How big are those files, for storage purposes? I have a lot of PC games, but, you know, I don’t like paying for all of them. Are you able to have tons of “alternative” Steam games or does storage space run out quick?
This program is used to transfer your games from your own server, to your computer. So you can store as many games as you can afford to.
Maybe this is the use case I’m not understanding. Do many people have servers that they just keep software they’re not using on? I mean this makes sense with movies and maybe music, but I feel like I’ve never heard of this with games and such.
Plex for games. That’s how I’m reading this. The advantage to me being that when I have a LAN party I can say “Grab Quake 3 from this URL” instead of “grab Quake 3 from this network folder”. Not a huge thing. But it might help not over sharing.
