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
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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.
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
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…
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.
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”…
And when we are troubleshooting, we’ll be searching “crackpipe _____”… I can definitely think of a few scenarios where that’ll return very different results than expected.
Would be kind of funny to skew Google results for crackpipe towards a game platform though.
And it’s not like you can even abbreviate it since cp has its own problematic connotations when it comes to the Internet
This is a tool for hosting pirated games. It’s not meant to be safe for work or kids.
I get that the name is offensive, but it doesn’t really matter. They’re not going to hire a marketing team and do an IPO.
Also, the name makes sense. It’s a pipe to transport cracked games.
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Good point. I should definitely be more comfortable introducing my children to a software suite called “crackpipe”.
🙄
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crack is so addictive it’s better to never mention its name.
Crack pipe isn’t racist. People of all Skin tones can enjoy that sweet sweet crack.
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.
Agreed. Not doing the least bit of research and choosing an edgy name makes this seem extremely amateurish.
“Amateurish”? This is literally a server for hosting pirated games, who gives a fuck.
Also, if your first thought after reading the word crackpipe is black people, maybe you’re the racist one.
And even if in the US it does have this connotation (IDK I’m not American), why should Europeans care?
And even if in the US it does have this connotation (IDK I’m not American), why should Europeans care?
The same reason you’d probably care if an American said something ignorant about Europeans. I feel like this is like saying “The N word wasn’t used in my country, it doesn’t mean to us what it means to you, so why do you care if I use the word?”
Obviously that’s taking the example to an extreme, but I think you get the gist.
well, you can’t keep every weird american racist issue in mind, there are too many
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Exactly. Probably the most famous crack user is the white son of the current US president.
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The name is fitting because it’s for cracked games, which are piped in a single programme. I don’t think it needs changing.
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”.
Honestly even calling it CrackedPipe would be better than straight up crackpipe, lmao
I’m envisioning the possible reverse scenario where you get someone wanting some crack and won’t take “Uhhh, I was just talking about a video game thing” as an answer
Then again Gimp is incredibly popular…
Everyone gets that. It’s just that sometimes things can be clever and stupid, unwise, and an automatic NO
I like to commit crimes while screaming that I’m committing crimes.
It makes the crimes more obvious so that everyone knows I’m committing crimes.
CRIMES
As a European, I honestly don’t get what you’re saying. Maybe it’s worth thinking about not forcing your opinions and societal problems onto other people?
It’s okay to not know what something is. Crack pipes are WIDELY known to be drug delivery devices. That’s not unique to the United States.
Furthermore, advertising your product as being used to pipe “cracked” (otherwise known as … stolen) games RIGHT there in the name of your product is like daring law enforcement to shut you down in actual record breaking time.
If you want your company to survive such things, you pick a name that is even more clever in that it isn’t… moronic.
I hope you realize this is the purpose of the application? Moreover, piracy is not stealing because it involves copying or distribution of digital content, while stealing refers to the act of taking someone’s property without permission, depriving them of its use.
Ah well, maybe that IS uniquely American, the concept that depriving a company that makes digital content of their sales, depriving them of the use of that money they’d otherwise have, IS stealing.
I’m not defending those poor digital content creators, mind you. But your words here tell me you are both European and young. Be careful out there, ok. The people that make the laws don’t agree with your definitions, and that means you gotta be ready to explain to them why what you did was totally allowed and decent.
You’re assuming again, mate, and this time you’re completely off the mark.
Not only that, but you also keep reducing my post counts while upvoting yourself. Everyone can see it mate, this isn’t reddit…
In the US they can change it to MethPipe
Care to explain? I’m curious.
Here’s a wiki article about the incident they are talking about. Basically it’s believed that in order to get money to arm rebels in Nicaragua the CIA assisted with importing cocaine to the US and specifically primarily black neighborhoods fueling the crack epidemic.
They tried. It’s just your standard case of everything is racist
Ah, nothing fancy then.
Check the Edit :)
Much better name!! Nice job responding constructively to feedback, wish more devs had the same level of grace with these types of situations. Wishing you all the best of success with this project!
Even without the racist connotations in the US it’s a weird name.
Obviously not as bad though
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.
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
Terrible name. Call it something like Gamepipe instead.
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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.
A product’s name should reflect what it does, not what you were smoking when you came up with the idea.
I love the idea. I think the UI can use improvement.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong since I’m not familiar with all this, but would I be able to “upload and share” a game that I bought from GoG since GoG games are DRM free?
Yes. Just keep in mind that will likely break licensing for virtually any game you’ve legally purchased.
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”?
This seems cool, but damn I wish there was something like this for Steam games or something. That’s the biggest thing I miss from Sony’s ecosystem, and Steam’s “Family Share” is pretty bad in comparison.
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
