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

top 50 comments

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[–] 96 points 3 years ago (62 children)

Cool idea, problematic name. Have you considered any others? There’s a ton of racist/problematic connotations in the US with this name that probably wouldn’t be well understood in DE/EU…

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  • [–] 54 points 3 years ago (11 children)

    Agreed. As an American, cool concept, rough name. There is no way I’m recommending a software called crackpipe at work.

    And let’s say I wanted to use it, I’m going to install this and instruct my kids how to use crackpipe? I’m sure that will go over great with little Timmy’s school when he tells his teacher and friends.

    I’d strongly consider changing it.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago

    And let’s say I wanted to use it, I’m going to install this and instruct my kids how to use crackpipe?

    I mean I get your point, but if you instruct your kids how to use a tool for managing pirated games, they are probably going to see a lot harsher stuff than the word "crack pipe"..

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  • [–] 36 points 3 years ago (23 children)

    Crack pipe isn't racist. People of all Skin tones can enjoy that sweet sweet crack.

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  • [–] 23 points 3 years ago (18 children)

    In the US specifically there’s some historical connotations back to the 80’s and how the US government fucked over black communities by flooding them with crack. I’m sure you all didn’t mean anything racist/negative with this, but wanted to flag this to y’all since you were based in the EU and likely wouldn’t have the same connotations with the term :)

    Anyways, best of luck with this! It’s a cool idea.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago* (14 children)

    The name is fitting because it's for cracked games, which are piped in a single programme. I don't think it needs changing.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    You can rationalize it all you want, at the end of the day when you say crackpipe there’s only one thing that comes to mind.

    I’m just imaging a conversation at work talking about a new game, and someone saying they haven’t picked it up yet and a colleague overhearing their co-worker say “just hit the crackpipe”.

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    [–] 71 points 3 years ago (13 children)

    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.

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    [–] 49 points 3 years ago

    Terrible name. Call it something like Gamepipe instead.

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  • [–] 38 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 38 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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

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    [–] 31 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 30 points 3 years ago

    Cool software.

    Even as someone sympathetic to 'privateers' though...you gotta have more plausible deniability bro, workshop that name lmao

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  • [–] 21 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    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.

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    [–] 20 points 3 years ago

    I love the chutzpah of it.

    Creative commons isn't a licence designed for code though, consider using the AGPL instead.

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  • [–] 19 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    For god sakes, change the damn name.

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    [–] 12 points 3 years ago

    I thought it was satire at first 😂

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I'd be interested if there's any plans for a Linux client

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago

    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.

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    [+] 10 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)
    [–] 8 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    So it's like game streaming with Geforce Game Streaming and Moonlight?

    But like others already said: Reconsider that name...

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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    [–] 7 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    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"?

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