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