What features would you want in a decentralized gaming platform similar to Steam?
What features would you want in a decentralized gaming platform similar to Steam?
Hey everyone! I noticed that the discussions around the recently released self-hosted alternative to Steam and Origin, have been focused on its controversial name. Let's shift the conversation and talk about the features you would like to see or wouldn't care about in this software.
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Im a bit confused. What's self hosted here? I download a game onto my computer from Steam, now Im self hosting it for myself. Is it someone else that's hosting the games for download and selling them? Might be cool to pay and download games directly from a developer, if that's at all possible from this, but thats not mentioned anywhere.
Is it just file sharing? Is that what this is?
To cut out the BS legal double speak, it's so you can have a steam-like interface that's designed to be natively compatible with pirated games and allow friends to access them from your server
It seems to be an application where you can access all your games at once, in the vein of steams library section. Not really interested.
but thats just basically a folder of shortcuts, my games arent in steam's library, they're installed on my PC. Steam is a storefront.
They described it as jellyfin but for games. Yet unlike with jellyfin where you can stream your media to any device, you just can't do that with games. So yeah it's basically a server to put your games on for convenient downloading to your PC, which seems utterly pointless and expensive.
Maybe there will be future features that make it useful, but I can't currently think of a use case for this other than maybe you're already running a torrent server and this just provides some convenience and a few QOL improvements. I can't see regular people using this though.
you absolutely can stream games. It's doable, it's just hard. nvidia's geforce now does game streaming over the internet. On a LAN it could really work well IMO. Steam link also did this on lan.
not super desirable for most users, but there's an appeal there and it is indeed doable.
You can stream games via Steam, install steam and log in on a different computer and you can stream the game by selecting what machine you want it to run from
I wasn't talking about the exceptions to the rule, I simply meant that from a practical standpoint you aren't going to be able to stream 99% of your games over the internet and this service doesn't offer that, unlike jellyfin's media. But yes you're right streaming games is a thing, just not in this case.
ah, then yeah you're right. it's possible in theory, but in practice not really. and it's not even desirable for most.
If you want to stream games there is a GitHub user called Games-on-whales. He has two docker programs that are effectively a game streaming server capable of serving multiple users.
It's not fully developed yet and I encountered a few issues while testing it, but it was very quick and easy to setup.
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