Hello c/selfhosted,
GameVault is a free, self-hostable gaming platform for organizing, browsing, downloading, installing, and playing your DRM-free game files stored on your home servers. It’s a full-featured alternative to platforms like Steam, designed for users who want complete control over their infrastructure and share their gaming library with friends and family.
With GameVault, you get:
- A native Windows client with full offline gaming support
- A beautiful library to browse your game collection
- Fully automated game installations
- Game progress tracking
- Rich metadata and cover art
- Cloud save functionality for seamless play across devices
- Multi-user architecture with role-based access control
Check it out here if you haven’t had a chance to set it up yet!
We’re excited to announce a major new release: The Identity Update
Why This Update Matters
Until now, GameVault used Basic Auth and supported one user per user device. This simple approach worked when the platform was just a side project for two friends.
But GameVault has grown, thousands of users, more setups, and higher expectations. This update lays the foundation for secure, scalable identity management and multi-user capabilities. We’ve shipped several great features with this release, including:
🔐 Modern Authentication & SSO Support
SSO support has been one of the oldest and most requested features on our issue tracker. Reworking the entire auth system was no small task, it took over five months to implement and test. But it’s done, marking a major step forward.
GameVault now uses OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect as its authentication foundation. This enables secure, modern login flows while staying flexible: traditional username and password login still works, but now runs on token-based authentication with session-based access and refresh tokens instead of basic auth.
If you want to use an identity provider, GameVault can integrate directly with providers like Keycloak, Authentik, Authelia, Google, Microsoft, Discord, or virtually any other RFC-compliant OAuth 2.0 or OIDC service.
This overhaul not only improves security and user experience, but also opens new possibilities for the platform, like web-based clients.
👥 Multi-Profile Support (GameVault+)
Need to support multiple users or connect to multiple servers on the same machine? GameVault+ now offers fully separated user profiles, each with its own server connection, game library, save data, preferences, and more. Whether you’re sharing a PC with family or housemates or just want to stay organized, profiles keep everyone’s games and progress completely separate.
💾 Installing Games Across Multiple Drives
Long overdue: GameVault now supports multiple root install directories, letting you choose where each game is installed. Whether you’re splitting your library across SSDs and HDDs or just organizing games, GameVault manages paths and indexing automatically.
How to Update
Due to the massive changes older clients and servers are not compatible with the newer infrastructure anymore, so you will probably need to update:
- Client: Update via Microsoft Store or GitHub.
- Server: Update via Docker or GitHub.
- Docs: Full documentation available here.
Thank You
Reaching so many regular users and GameVault+ subscribers is something we never imagined when we started this project. Thank you for trying it, testing it, using it and most of all, supporting it.
We still enjoy spending all our free time on this project, and as long as you keep us going, we won’t stop.
Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts,
The Phalcode Team
This project looks interesting, and this update does come with some significant improvements. However, I imagine on Lemmy you’ll find a pretty high percentage of Linux users, who won’t be able to use the client. Something like this with a Linux client that can integrate with Lutris to install games would be really cool.
As mentioned above, there are workarounds to run the client on Linux, but rewriting the app to create a native version is just too much effort for two hobby devs. I wish I had designed it that way from the beginning, but it simply grew from a two-user app with the tools we had to a 5,000-user app, and now here we are.
Understandable, I’m mostly just commenting on the demographic in this particular Lemmy topic.
I get that “just port it to Linux” is no easy undertaking, especially if multiplatform wasn’t part of the original architecture.
No Linux client? 😞
No native one but it is possible to run the client on linux via wine.
Wait so does the client install the game on the local machine, or does the game run on the server like steam link?
I’ve never used them, but if you want streaming, you can use Moonlight/Sunshine. It’d be very cool if a project integrated everything together, so you could choose whether to download the games or stream them from the server.
Theres no streaming service, they need to install them but the platform serves them like a storefront
Which makes the lack of a Linux client so bizarre. It’s literally just file storage and a link manager.
