It’s u/Alfagun74 from GameVault, the self-hosted platform for organizing and sharing your servers DRM-free games collection. We’ve come a long way since our initial release, and I’m thrilled to share what’s been happening with GameVault since then.
From “Crackpipe” to GameVault
If you’ve been with us since the start, you might remember our initial quirky name, “Crackpipe.” Well, we had a good laugh, but as we grew, we decided to go for something more fitting – GameVault! It’s your personal gaming treasure trove, and the name says it all.
What’s GameVault?
For the uninitiated, GameVault is like having your own Steam for game files lying on your server. It’s a self-hosted, source-available gaming platform. Bring your DRM-free game files, and GameVault organizes them, enriches them with metadata, and gives you a user-friendly interface to manage and play your games. It’s all about enjoying your favorite titles with friends.
What’s happened since initial release?
Since our initial release four months ago, we’ve been hard at work, reaching version 9 on the backend and 1.7 on the frontend.
Here’s a reel of the exciting big features we’ve added:
Auto Extraction and Installation of Videogames
Uninstalling Games through GameVault
Uploading Images directly to your GameVault
Support for a metric ton of archive formats
Crash Reports
Database Backups & Restorations
Bandwidth Control
Random Game Finder
What’s on the Horizon?
We’ve been listening to your feedback, and here’s what was asked for the most:
Right now we’re knee-deep in redesigning the Library, the heart of our application. Big changes are on the way, waving goodbye to the installations tab and bringing in a sleeker UI for Library, Game View, and Game Settings. More on and a sneak-peek is coming to our blog soon.
Join the GameVault Community!
If you haven’t already, come join our vibrant community on Discord. You can influence the direction of GameVault and participate in exclusive polls over there.
Spread the Word and Stay Tuned!
Help us promote GameVault among fellow self-hosters. Your efforts could inspire a bored developer to join and contribute to our project!
This is pretty cool, I remember when you guys released it under the name crackpipe. For the record I really liked the name.
What’s the reason you chose to use a CC license? Why not any established open source license? Even Creative Commons themselves recommend using the GPL instead of CC for software.
You have a great sense of humor sir. Well… first of all im not a lawyer and i really liked the simple terms and conditions of the CC License compared to the usual ones for code. The terms literally fit in a 160x20px image. Also our product is not open-source by definition. That link is an interesting blog-post i made about that topic. You should definitely check it out, if you’re interested. I hope this clears this up a bit.
Sure, but if you get my point, you’ll see that I aim to safeguard our work from being used for profit by someone that did not contribute anything to it. As for the subscription features we’re thinking about for the future, my idea is to let users tweak the source code for their own needs without any charge and the license perfectly fits these needs.
Okay let’s be clear here: NO open source license disallows commercial use by a third party. It’s literally against the definition of open-source-software. It’s even green on the very site you linked.
Yeah, the only thing kind of close is GPL3’s infectious license and that still allows for profit use assuming the code is opened. (Harder to be evil here but technically still possible.)
Unfortunately this will cause issues if the community attempts to do anything with this package later as well. See the fiasco with Multimc and Polymc. Nobody came out of that looking particularly inviting for devs. I feel bad for the one guy that walked the line between the two licenses for as long as he did. I just ended up jumping to the community fork because they addressed my issues faster and their license ended up being more permissive.
Thank you for understanding. It was honestly a hard decision to make and i really respect every single open-source-developer out there, from the bottom of my heart. But having talked to them i really realized the cruel truth in this capitalist world is most of them have a hard time keeping the lights on using their work. It’s really a bummer.
I’m commenting on this again because I actually tried this tonight. The info is pretty sparse. I know it’s an alternate install method, but in bottles there’s a lot of variables.
Even just knowing which runner was used in testing would help a ton, as there are quite a few, and each has tons of versions.
just join our discord (linked in the post) and ask for a helping hand, there are plenty of users already running it. Maybe you can improve the docs there aswell, as they are a community effort.
Very interesting project! However, I can’t help shake the feeling that whilst you pitch it as a platform for sharing DRM-free games, it will get used for sharing games against the licenses and wishes of publishers. I don’t really care about the publishers, but do you not think there is a great risk that once your app gets enough attention, it will draw their ire and force you to shut down? Perhaps not directly, but e.g., removing you from the windows store etc.
There’s nothing illegal about GameVault. It’s a tool. It can be used correctly for its intended purpose or misused by others. Banning it would be like banning cars because some people use them as weapons instead of for transportation. So no, I don’t fear any trouble at all. After all, platforms like Plex/Jellyfin, which are basically GameVault for Movies and TV Series, are doing totally fine and are well-established in the general public already.
A game changer for me would be to have it setup to connect to one or more GOG accounts and pull files with like a checkbox interface and let it automatically download updates. That way the server kind of acts like a local cache.
I just got a NAS and downloaded all my GOG and Humble games into it. Didn’t even occur to me that something like this existed. I’m going to have to give it a try soon, since it sounds like Linux through Wine is supported.
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This is pretty cool, I remember when you guys released it under the name crackpipe. For the record I really liked the name.
What’s the reason you chose to use a CC license? Why not any established open source license? Even Creative Commons themselves recommend using the GPL instead of CC for software.
You have a great sense of humor sir. Well… first of all im not a lawyer and i really liked the simple terms and conditions of the CC License compared to the usual ones for code. The terms literally fit in a 160x20px image. Also our product is not open-source by definition. That link is an interesting blog-post i made about that topic. You should definitely check it out, if you’re interested. I hope this clears this up a bit.
Have you looked at things like Photoprism that have an open source free base product and then a modified license covering the subscription features?
Sure, but if you get my point, you’ll see that I aim to safeguard our work from being used for profit by someone that did not contribute anything to it. As for the subscription features we’re thinking about for the future, my idea is to let users tweak the source code for their own needs without any charge and the license perfectly fits these needs.
AGPLv3 exists for this exact reason https://choosealicense.com/licenses/agpl-3.0/
Okay let’s be clear here: NO open source license disallows commercial use by a third party. It’s literally against the definition of open-source-software. It’s even green on the very site you linked.
Yeah, the only thing kind of close is GPL3’s infectious license and that still allows for profit use assuming the code is opened. (Harder to be evil here but technically still possible.)
Unfortunately this will cause issues if the community attempts to do anything with this package later as well. See the fiasco with Multimc and Polymc. Nobody came out of that looking particularly inviting for devs. I feel bad for the one guy that walked the line between the two licenses for as long as he did. I just ended up jumping to the community fork because they addressed my issues faster and their license ended up being more permissive.
Thanks for linking the blog post. I may not agree with the conclusion you’ve come to, but I think you’ve done a good job at laying your arguments.
Thank you for understanding. It was honestly a hard decision to make and i really respect every single open-source-developer out there, from the bottom of my heart. But having talked to them i really realized the cruel truth in this capitalist world is most of them have a hard time keeping the lights on using their work. It’s really a bummer.
I also find it absolutely hilarious that you were considering monetising a product named Crackpipe. Not sure how successful you’d be at that.
I was side-eying GIMP i guess. Didn’t work for us though. 😅
GIMP is FLOSS though?
“gimp” is a slur for disabled people. Thats what i am talking about.
I have no idea what you’re talking about at this point.
Still think you should have kept the original name for the lulz
Does this still require you to get the Windows App from the Windows Store? Thats the main reason I ditched.
Good News
The Linux install method link on that page leads to a page not found
thanks ill fix it in a couple mins :)
Thanks!
I’m commenting on this again because I actually tried this tonight. The info is pretty sparse. I know it’s an alternate install method, but in bottles there’s a lot of variables.
Even just knowing which runner was used in testing would help a ton, as there are quite a few, and each has tons of versions.
just join our discord (linked in the post) and ask for a helping hand, there are plenty of users already running it. Maybe you can improve the docs there aswell, as they are a community effort.
Very interesting project! However, I can’t help shake the feeling that whilst you pitch it as a platform for sharing DRM-free games, it will get used for sharing games against the licenses and wishes of publishers. I don’t really care about the publishers, but do you not think there is a great risk that once your app gets enough attention, it will draw their ire and force you to shut down? Perhaps not directly, but e.g., removing you from the windows store etc.
There’s nothing illegal about GameVault. It’s a tool. It can be used correctly for its intended purpose or misused by others. Banning it would be like banning cars because some people use them as weapons instead of for transportation. So no, I don’t fear any trouble at all. After all, platforms like Plex/Jellyfin, which are basically GameVault for Movies and TV Series, are doing totally fine and are well-established in the general public already.
A game changer for me would be to have it setup to connect to one or more GOG accounts and pull files with like a checkbox interface and let it automatically download updates. That way the server kind of acts like a local cache.
I just got a NAS and downloaded all my GOG and Humble games into it. Didn’t even occur to me that something like this existed. I’m going to have to give it a try soon, since it sounds like Linux through Wine is supported.