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?

  • Byolock@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Actually you could remove most of the drawbacks if you split up your gpu (there are multiple technologies which enable you to do that, but your gpu would need to support at least one of them) and give each of your friends a virtual machine to play on. That way everyone could play at the same time. Though you get a new drawback : the experience would certainly be very limited if you share the GPU resources with multiple VMs. I think VRAM is fixed so if you have 16gb of vram and two virtual machines each with 5GB of VRAM you got yourself 6GB left, no matter if someone is actually playing on one of the VMs.