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.
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.
I keep a few on my nas that i like going back too, fo4, sims, gta5, stuff like that. but navigating to a network share has never been an issue.
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.
I think you’ve got cooler friends than I do.