The USS Quad Damage

Just found out about a neat FLOSS project called Drop. It takes your DRM free games and puts them in an environment very similar to Steam, where you can download them from a server, get updates, and browse and launch them. It's also a non-AI project, so that's nice.

You might be wondering why you might want something like this when Steam exists, when Heroic exists, and so on. I can give some current use cases, some hopes and dreams, and some other possibilities which make it pretty handy as a tool.

But first, a warning. It's a pretty nascent project. It's been around since 2025, but I think it's basically just on the cusp of being usable. Having said that, the fundamentals are rock solid, the team working on it really put a lot of effort into that, and now I have a feeling the project is going to gain serious momentum very quickly. Still, it's worth knowing that there's a bunch of functionality which is barely there, or not yet present.

Server and client

OK, let's lay out the land, Drop is not just a launcher. If you're thinking of Playnite, think again. It's got a client which looks very much like a launcher, but the key is that you have a backend server. This means the primary use cases are going to be for the homelab and LAN setups. If you have a beefy NAS, this is the tool to keep and distribute game backups. If you're hosting a LAN, this is the tool to share out games.

There's also no flatpak as yet for the client, though the team seems to be testing it. This means that eventually your Bazzite or SteamOS install can just flatpak install it. This works (or will, when it's ready) really well if you have multiple computers in the house (eg: a main PC and a Steam Deck), as you can conveniently just install Drop and connect to the server, giving you access to all your games.

Emulators

While there's some support for emulators in Drop, really if you want an emulators library, you want to use RomM. It's a similar idea, client-server launcher, but it's oriented towards emulators, with a complete Web based emulators, as well as clients for handhelds. If you have a ROM library, it also expects those ROMs in that exact folder structure. In short, if you want to be able to play your ROM library on the go, on various devices, locally, and so on, RomM is your best bet. Drop is for “PC” games.

Installation

There's a Docker Compose install for the server, and debian packages for the client. It's pretty simple, but (as of now) there's a pretty annoying step, which is that all games need to be installed “manually” in a specific folder structure, on the server.

Another minor annoyance (though, good for security) is that on initial install, you will get given a login link for your admin, but this is in the docker logs. You can then create the admin and begin to administer the system. This isn't really mentioned anywhere, so you have to just know to look in the logs.

So you grab the installer, or the game files, and you have to put them in <library>/<game>/<version>/<game_files>. Each version can have the entire game or updates from the previous version. The admin library will then ask you to import the game with appropriate details.

By the way, this is what I mean by solid fundamentals. They have an internal content server called Torrential, which is really performant, and will chunk the data up in a way to distribute it fast. The other solid piece is user management.

Users

You can mostly get by with an admin and a normal user, but the user flows are amazing. It supports “plain” logins, but also OIDC if you have a server for it. It has multi factor authentication, WebAuthn, API tokens, and will let you sign in on a client by filling in a code on the server. While it's missing some features, you can literally run this on a fairly medium-large LAN for game downloads.

Use cases

1. The weird corner case games — This is why I initially installed Drop. I have some games which are just unusual and sitting on my hard drive. I have Hydra Castle Labyrinth for example, which is also kind of just sitting there. Apparently a backup now exists on Itch, and there's GPL2 code on Github, but there's no official home for it. I also have Virtual Cottage, which has since gone onto Steam and Itch and it's free, but I guess I still have a copy on my computer. Overall, the point is that now I can collect these silly ideas or games or things on just random websites, or even get “direct download” games from people who don't want to go onto Steam or Itch or whatever. Bearded Giant games (currently down, hopefully not forever) was trying to do this IIRC, but I never really got their games because it's just some website.
2. Played games — Similarly, this is why I installed Drop. I have a couple of games I got off Gog which I finished playing. I didn't want to delete them since they were large and I didn't want to re-download them, so I just copied them to my NAS. Now they were just kind of sitting there.
3. FLOSS games — This sort of starts the “hopes and dreams” portion of what I want to do. I have a bunch of floss games, some flatpaks, some debian packages. The issue is that often these versions are out of date, or I'm basically forced to update them. These are kind of contradictory problems, I know, but when I'm doing a system update, I also don't want to download several gigs for a minor version bump in a game I'm not currently playing. Contrariwise, I don't want to always use the package versions, because the deb packages might be years out of date. Instead, I could just grab the game files and put them on the NAS, updating them every now and then. If I'm not currently playing those games, I can just not install them on clients.
4. Physical Games — Another “hopes and dreams” thing. I have a bunch of physical games that I more or less can't play because my machines don't have DVD drives any more, but I can plug in a USB drive to get data off those disks. Drop lets you do installers. The only downside is that I'd need to hunt down a nocd patch (hopefully official) from somewhere. This would be akin to me “digitising” my game library.
5. LANs — Obviously, both FLOSS / Freeware, or otherwise DRM free games could be played at a LAN with several people able to download from Drop. They are still working on the various multiplayer bits and bobs, it's honestly insane just how much LAN functionality Steam has, but at least for the game distribution, you can do it all with Drop.
6. Game Preservation / Escape hatch — Drop are working on Gog support, but if you wanted to mass backup games from Epic or even Steam (though the functionality is not planned), this is at least an option as far as an exodus goes. Gabe isn't going to live forever, and no one knows what will happen at that point. Having something like Drop at least creates some connective tissue for being able to save your collection.

Conclusion

Drop is a great server-client library manager for DRM free games. It has several great use cases, pretty solid fundamentals, and I believe a pretty great future. If there's a down side, it's the name “Drop” is used for a lot of other things, so at least until it becomes ubiquitous, it's going to be hard for it to grow. Still, hopefully others will use it and rave about it like I have here.

Forza Horizon 6 will be remembered as a cenotaph for legacy carmakers and it annoys me that no one in the game industry commentariat has drawn that conclusion.

All the cars go “vroom” and have gears and are made by companies in some amount of turmoil if not actively undergoing mergers to survive. It's set in a country known for legacy carmakers and car culture that's looking increasingly anachronistic.

If the game had more defunct manufacturers then the shape of the game changes, but focusing on these cars makes the whole thing about Steam Trains.

EDIT: Relevant Angela Collier video (with timecode)

The modern equivalent might be me or someone my age forcing my children to learn to pump gas as if gasoline cars would exist in the future, because they just wouldn't. It doesn't make sense to buy a gasoline car

Just played through Spiritfarer, and I think I have a theory about Cosy Games. Cosy Games by-customer-need must fit in a genre where you are both given clear instruction for what to do (achiever) and also something you can doodle on with no expectations (explorer). This is why RPG style games sort-of fit, because once mastery is achieved the game becomes rote, and you trivially achieve while exploring.

This is why a game built for being Cosy doesn't work. It must simultaneously satisfy both urges, the urge to get told you're doing well at a given task, and the urge to not be held to a high standard. You end up with games which are regimented in that they must score you somehow, but also they need to sort of act like they don't care about it. That's what feels off about these games. They're like “here's a task, you could do it, or not upto you”. This is also kind of where Animal Crossing sort of works: It gives you tasks a computer cannot score (draw a picture, make a song) other than completion, which the player dictates. Then, the other residents “judge” you on it, and they're always nice. It's a neat trick where they bait-and-switch from game rules –> narrative.

Ergo, if you're making a cosy game, you should create open ended tasks and then the “judgement” should come from narrative elements.

I've been meaning to restore the old blog, but there are a number of issues.

First, I did a backup and restore of some metadata incorrectly, and one of my cohorts' posts ended up under my own name. Secondly, realistically I was the only one posting for a long time, so it made sense for this to become my personal blog. Thirdly, I would have liked to post more often, not to mention post using the Fedi standards, but I just never could do the work to create a bespoke blog.

Finally, this blog used our real names, and while that might have been OK a long time ago, I just don't trust the world anymore. I still trust you if you're reading this. I just don't trust the automated systems which link data everywhere. You probably know who this is.

As such, I also think it's unwise to keep my old posts here. They were of me and us as children, and no longer reflect who I am now. I'll miss it, because I don't regret any of it, but we live in a world of bad faith and fragile egos. But also, a world where whatever edgy humour might have been here has acted as cover for actual hate to fester and spread. I guess I'm not so proud of that.

Nevertheless, let's see how we go. I'll try and post more long-form stuff here. My online persona is now purposely fragmented, shorter stuff goes to Mastodon, upvotes and shitposts go to Lemmy. I'm on slrpnk and aus.social with different names. They're nice places with good mods.