After 3 years in the making I’m excited to announce the launch of Games on Whales, an innovative open-source project that revolutionizes virtual desktops and gaming. Our mission is to enable multiple users to stream different content from a single machine, with full HW acceleration and low latency.
With Games on Whales, you can:
- Multi-user: Share a single remote host hardware with friends or colleagues, each streaming their own content (gaming, productivity, or anything else!)
- Headless: Create virtual desktops on demand, with automatic resolution and FPS matching, without the need for a monitor or dummy plug
- Advanced Input Support: Enjoy seamless control with mouse, keyboard, and joypads, including Gyro and Acceleration support (a first in Linux!)
- Low latency: Uses the Moonlight protocol to stream content to a wide variety of supported clients.
- Linux and Docker First: Our curated Docker images include popular applications like Steam, Firefox, Lutris, Retroarch, and more!
- Fully Open Source: MIT licensed, and we welcome contributions from the community.
Interested in how this works under the hood? You can read more about it in our developer guide or deep dive into the code.
still steam prevents you from running more than one game at once from one account. can’t start vampire survivors on the deck and play manor lords on the other pc using the same account. family sharing and using multiple accounts should work, though 🤔
Yeah, I think that’s the general idea. They are seperate instances of Steam that could be signed into different accounts. So yeah, if you’re doing multiplayer of one game, each account would need to own it. That would be the exact same limitation at a LAN party anyway. This just lets you host said LAN party on a single beefy box, and use thin clients for each gamer, like an RPi4, a tablet or even an Apple/Android TV.
I believe this is akin to an open-source version of Stadia or Geforce now. Essentially, you have a powerful server that can be used by multiple users to play their own games. So, along with a couple of friends, you could purchase a powerful server, and then connect to it with a weak home computer.
Well said! That’s exactly the idea!