Because I see some serious drawbacks, this is honestly more of a thought experiment than something I actually intend on deploying but I am curious if there are ways around the drawbacks or if I just misunderstand.
I know you can use moonlight and sunshine to self host a cloud gaming solution. But AFAICT it is only intended for someone playing their own games on their own computer
What I’m interested in is allowing friends to play their games that they have purchased on my computer, which runs windows.
The drawbacks I see are I can’t play games on my computer while they’re playing, requiring trust that my friends and I don’t mess with each others game accounts, and a constant need to log in and out of accounts
If I install and run sunshine on my main user account, then anybody who I set up with a sunshine account will be able to play as me any game I already own. They could log me out of their steam/ubisoft/whatever, and then log into their own account. If they forget to log out after they’re done, then I could potentially play as them (not that I intend to)
If I create a separate windows account per sunshine account, then they could avoid having to log in and out of their game accounts. But then I would have to manually log into the windows account for them. And ultimately I could still play the game as them
Are there any other solutions? I know there’s no way to get around me not being able to play if they’re playing. And ultimately I don’t see how anything would be able to prevent me from playing games as my friends if they leave themselves sign in, since I have admin privileges on my computer. But is there any way to avoid having to constantly log in and out?
Are there other self hosted cloud gaming solutions that would work better for this?
You could set up each of them a Steam-headless docker container. I use one on my nas to game on a very low end laptop.
Ooh this is interesting. My gaming computer only runs windows currently but since I wouldn’t be able to game when my friends used it I could just reboot into Linux when I’m not using it.
Seems like it needs a dedicated gpu so only one person could use it at a time but that’s fine
I personally run it on a linux system, but If you wanted to I don’t see why you couldn’t just run docker on your windows install (Make sure you follow the wsl 2 guide, and not the hyper-v one. Docker for Windows doesn’t support gpu passthrough on hyper-v). As for the gpu issue while I’ve never tried gaming simultaneously, I do have several docker containers accessing 1 gpu. So it might be worth a shot to see if they could all, or at least a couple, could play off of the one gpu, but it would depend on how heavy the games you’re playing are of course.