The FOSS Revolution Comes to Gaming: Self-Hosting Your Own Steam
The world of self-hosting has been quietly revolutionising how we manage our digital lives, from music streaming with Jellyfin to photo storage with PhotoPrism. Now, it seems gaming is getting its turn with projects like Drop, a FOSS alternative to Steam that lets you host your own game library.
When I first came across the announcement for Drop v0.3.0, my DevOps brain immediately perked up. Here’s a project that’s tackling something I’ve been frustrated with for years – the complete dependence on corporate gaming platforms and their ever-changing terms of service. The idea of self-hosting your own game distribution platform feels both ambitious and necessary.
What caught my attention isn’t just the technical implementation (though the Docker support and multi-architecture builds are impressive), but the broader implications for digital ownership. We’ve all experienced that sinking feeling when a game gets delisted from Steam or when licensing issues make our purchases inaccessible. Drop seems to address this by focusing on DRM-free games – those from GOG, independent developers, or yes, even “Linux ISOs” as one user diplomatically put it.
The discussion around the project reveals some interesting perspectives on the current state of game management. People are comparing it to existing solutions like Playnite and GameVault, with legitimate concerns about platform limitations and paywalled features. One user mentioned GameVault’s decision to paywall basic functionality like cloud saves – exactly the kind of corporate nickel-and-diming that drives me toward open-source alternatives.
What’s particularly clever about Drop’s approach is how it handles the complexity of modern PC gaming on Linux. The integration with umu-launcher for Proton and Wine prefixes shows they understand that self-hosting gamers aren’t just Windows users looking for a Steam clone – many of us are Linux enthusiasts who’ve grown tired of being second-class citizens in the gaming world.
The licensing discussion in the comments was fascinating from a developer perspective. The choice of AGPL-3 sparked debate about enterprise adoption and potential violations, but I think the maintainers made the right call. The Affero license ensures that any improvements to the platform benefit the community, not just companies looking to commercialise open-source work without giving back.
There’s something deeply satisfying about the idea of curating your own game library on your own hardware. It reminds me of the early days of computing when you truly owned your software. Sure, it requires more technical knowledge than clicking “Install” on Steam, but for those of us already running home labs with NAS arrays and Docker containers, it’s just another service in the stack.
The project isn’t without challenges. The developers mentioned their Australian internet limitations preventing them from hosting a demo instance – a problem many of us down here can relate to. But that’s exactly why distributed, self-hosted solutions matter. Instead of relying on centralised infrastructure, we can build resilient networks of individual hosts.
What excites me most about Drop is its potential to evolve gaming culture toward something more sustainable and user-controlled. While I don’t expect it to replace Steam for mainstream gaming anytime soon, it represents an important alternative for those who value digital autonomy over convenience.
The timing feels right too. With increasing concerns about digital preservation, corporate surveillance, and platform lock-in, projects like Drop offer a glimpse of what gaming could look like if we prioritised user agency over corporate profits. It’s not just about hosting games – it’s about reclaiming control over our digital entertainment libraries.
I’m planning to spin up a test instance this weekend to see how well it handles my collection of indie games and GOG purchases. If it works as advertised, it might just become a permanent addition to my homelab setup. After all, there’s something beautifully ironic about using cutting-edge container technology to preserve and distribute games in a way that feels more like sharing with friends than consuming from a corporate platform.