Hey folks,
our team has worked tirelessly for a year to bring you Crackpipe, the open-source, decentralized, and liberal alternative to conventional cloud-based game platforms like Steam and Origin. We’re thrilled to announce that Crackpipe is now available for everyone, and we’re delighted to share it with the community as an open-source project.
With Crackpipe, you and your friends can enjoy playing and tracking games on a shared file server, free from the restrictions of traditional platforms. Embracing “alternatively obtained” games, including DRM-free titles, Crackpipe offers a flexible and open approach to gaming - think Jellyfin, but for Videogames.
Take full control of your gaming experience with Crackpipe’s self-hosted approach. Explore your server’s game collection, securely download, launch, and play games, and monitor your playtimes and progress - all even when the server is offline. Compare stats and play states with other users on the server for added fun.
Our server features include automatic indexing of games, metadata enrichment with RAWG API, multi-user authentication, configurable logging, health monitoring, full-text search, filters, sorting, pagination, and a fully documented API. Crackpipe’s high configurability ensures it fits your specific needs.
Join us on this journey to embrace a more open, flexible, and enjoyable gaming experience for all. Try Crackpipe today and share your contributions, feedback, bug reports, and feature requests.
Link: https://crackpipe.de
You can also check out our launch at producthunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/crackpipe
UPDATE: here
I’m not going to talk with my friends about using something called crackpipe. Might be cool software, but I can’t take it seriously. This would be like if Plex called themselves bootlegpimp.
Completely agree, having a memorable name is important but that doesn’t mean the name should be a joke.
Still less embarrassing than recommending GIMP.
I can see your point but in my native language nobody has heard of gimp compared to crackpipe
Gonna contribute to the project just to keep the name as is
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Yea of a fucking pipe used to smoke crack…
Yeah, so what’s bad about that?
Do you smoke your crack from a bottle cap?;-)
I prefer empty cans of faygo
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
It’s not a big deal. But it’s ok to think the name is stupid, and that I’m not gonna use it if I think it’s stupid.
I think hyper-fixating on title irrespective of content is silly.
People are going to critique titles. Welcome to life. Life is tough. I get it.
Exactly. But sadly, nowadays its all about making as much noise as the other party, and convincing others that (insert something irrelevant here) is racist for no reason other than “it offends me”.
Terrible name. Call it something like Gamepipe instead.
As others have said, cool concept, awful name.
Bad name aside Windows only client support is a big letdown and makes the application useless to me.
My favourite part is 100% the name never change it
I for one will not be using this to introduce my kids to gore simulators where you can see chunks of peoples’ heads blown off at your own hands, because it’s called crack pipe, and that is where I draw the line
I just think it’s a dumb name is all
While Crackpipe can be used with cracked games, it does not encourage or condone piracy.
This is so fucking hilarious to me. Your logo is a pirate, and your app name is "crack"pipe (which is dumb for many reasons), and you use ‘alternatively sourced’ in the language instead of just talking about DRM-free games.
Cool software, but if you don’t want to get shut down you certainly should reconsider your approach.
reconsider your approach.
Start with the fucking name. Yikes.
Cool software.
Even as someone sympathetic to ‘privateers’ though…you gotta have more plausible deniability bro, workshop that name lmao
I love the chutzpah of it.
Creative commons isn’t a licence designed for code though, consider using the AGPL instead.
If you guys want this to take off in the US (and probably Canada too) you gotta rethink the name. If it doesn’t come off as vaguely racist it will come off as edgy for edgy’s sake. Low-brow and amateurish. Otherwise, it looks cool. Best of luck to you.
How tf is this racist?
Due to racist propaganda in the US during the 80s and 90s. Crack cocaine was portrayed in the media as a “black” drug, and many of the news stories about crack were specifically about it’s effects on black communities.
While the name isn’t inherently racist, in and of itself, it does still carry some racial connotations behind it. Maybe it’s different these days for zoomers, but growing up during the “crack epidemic”, as it was called, and seeing the way it was covered in the news, I can understand why some people are resistant to the name.
I didnt say it was racist. I said it could come off (i.e. perceived) as racist. Mainly due to cracks stereotypical association with poor African Americans. But I think you knew that.
For god sakes, change the damn name.
How about buttcrack? Jk that would be terrible. CriticalPoint would keep the two letter combo and be a dig at steam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_point_(thermodynamics)
CP is the second reason the name is terrible. “Let me connect to your CP server” is going to get so many people onto so many lists, unless they specify CP == CrackPipe.
There are just some names and abbreviations you do not use. And this is both of those.
I thought it was satire at first 😂
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I’d be interested if there’s any plans for a Linux client
Same here. My current method is a self hosted website on my home network which showcases all available games, followed by a bash script download that will automatically generate the yml file for Lutris to fully install any of my 200+ games.
Whilst this is currently the best way I’ve found for my setup this app seems like the perfect thing to potentially swap to, if Linux was supported.
There are no plans for a native linux client right now, but there is an awesome community-driven approach to run it on linxu in our docs here
cool stuff but what about packaging the games? only transfering files is most of the time not enough and games need registry stuff and what not and on games that need a setup.exe to be run, is that unattended like on steam or do users need to click “next, next, finish”?
Nah, you can often move around games on external drives from computer to computer just fine and they’ll typically work.
Often, sure. But not guaranteed.
Lol, gonna be honest, it would be pretty hard telling my friends about this awesome thing I learned about called Crackpipe.
That said, it’s not really something I could do anyway. My ISP doesn’t let me host servers, and they’re the only ISP in my area without disgustingly draconian data limits.
Could you not use something like Tailscale to access it remotely?
Damn, a good point. I already use ZeroTier for this kind of stuff, I don’t know why I never thought of that.
So it’s like game streaming with Geforce Game Streaming and Moonlight?
But like others already said: Reconsider that name…
I thought so too, but it isn’t - it’s a server that hosts your pirated games and a client that downloads from the server and installs them. It’s like Steam or Epic games, but for pirated games.
This looks more like Steam where users actually download and install the games.
