PC gaming is on a slow decline. If you haven’t kept up to date with recent events, let’s cover them real quickly. In the last couple of weeks, Steam and other digital game retailers have been having issues with payment processors regarding specific types of games. In short, this is censorship & we’re losing access to more media. Not good. On top of this, many countries are starting to implement age verification all throughout our everyday apps. Steam is one of them.
Steam has been the go to for years. It holds most of our games, sells even more games & has tons of features that we mostly take for granted. Those features, is exactly what a new open source project, ”Drop,” is trying to give us. They’re a small team, growing slowly with the addition of new contributors, and they’ve been working on the project for over a year now. They’re currently working on version 0.4.0 as I write this!
So let’s talk about what Drop exactly is. Currently, it’s a rough work in progress, but it still houses a ton of great features. At it’s core, it’s a game sharing platform for non-DRM games. It’s fully selfhosted, and runs in a Docker container. It uses a PostgresSQL Database to store all of it’s important info (Logins, Game Metadata, etc.) and it all runs fairly smoothly from my testing. (Testing period was pre v0.3 release.) Aside from the server, it utilizes a custom-built client that operates fairly similarly to Steam. It has a page for articles & community posts, a store page, library, settings, etc.
Drop plans to support:
- Multiplayer connectivity. Similar to Steam’s inviting & friends system.
- Playtime tracking, achievements, etc.
- Custom plugin support.
- Big picture mode & gamepad support.
- Emulation support.
- Selfhosted cloud saves.
- Full featured game updating.
- and more!
If you’re interested in the Drop project, I highly recommend joining their Discord & visiting their website, which I will link at the bottom of this post.
Now, for my opinions. I truly think we need a Steam-like application for the selfhosted community. We’ve had Gamevault, Gameyfin, and all the other similar apps, but nothing that touches the scale of Steam or what Drop will be and this excites me. I’m happy to see a group of people doing something refreshing. I personally think this will help with fostering communities, keeping niche games alive & supporting developers in all kinds of ways. In 3 years, we could see developers running their own servers, selling their games on those servers, and hosting multiplayer & other networking features directly through Drop. We’ll see though, could even be sooner than that.
The Drop ecosystem, even in it’s rough early stages, are very fluid. The sign in and authentication is simple, nice to work with & for once, not annoying. It has a beautiful introduction for admins & invitees. The layout itself is very sleek and calm, and makes it easy to look at. Libraries & Collections look great. The store page has gotten a rework since I last used it, but I have to say, even then, it looked very nice. Overall, it’s a very well designed service, and I think will slowly become even more fluid and comfortable.
In the end, I think this is going to be a great tool, and if used correctly, will be a big thing for the selfhosting community. I thank you so much for reading this, and make sure to check below for related links!
– DropOSS Github: https://github.com/drop-oss/drop
– DropOSS Website: https://droposs.org
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