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I'd like to keep all my games on a different computer and the folder with the games then just gets mounted on Windows via iSCS or NFS. This certainly works for one PC using the folder. But I'd like to use more than one PC to e.g. play the same game with friends at the same time. Everyone would use his own account but I don't know if there will be any issues when reading and in particular writing to the same drive. Most important stuff seems to get synced into the cloud anyways for common and recent games. I don't if games generally do a lot of writing to the program folder beyond saving the files. I mostly have games from Steam, UPlay, Origin and EpicGames in mind.

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  • I'm going to assume good faith and that this is not an attempt at piracy, but this sounds like a lot of effort and investment to achieve very little. What are you trying to accomplish that installing on every device would not?
    – Comic Sans Seraphim
    Feb 12, 2019 at 15:05
  • I don't know how this is related to piracy. Everone uses his own account so everyone would need to buy the game. The setup is easier to manage for me. Most stuff runs diskless at my homelab anyways. Of course there has to be some "master" disk somewhere.
    – pr0pofol
    Feb 12, 2019 at 15:11
  • But have all of the accounts bought their own copy of the game?
    – gre_gor
    Feb 19, 2019 at 23:27
  • @Studoku-ReinstateMonica use case: me and my kids. Each has its own computer and accounts, the intersection of the set of games that we play is non-empty. Having a centralized library would allow us to download games and updates only once reducing network congestion and optimizing storage usage.
    – leo
    Jun 23, 2020 at 22:37

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If the game is designed to support multiple players with only one copy of the game (and this does occasionally happen - Spawn Mode from the Starcraft games springs to mind), then there should be documentation to tell you how it's done. Either in a menu option or somewhere on the game's official website.

If the game is not specifically designed to support this style of play, then trying to do it on your own is probably verging on piracy, and thus off-topic for discussion around here.

If the game in question is an online multiplayer game (something like Fortnite) then the developer's servers may also have means of detecting that multiple users are all running the same copy of the game (assuming you can make it work) and that might lead to bans, account suspensions and goodness knows what else. Not judging or anything, just FYI.

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  • I see. I was not aware of that issue. I don't have piracy in mind since everyone one would use his own account. Since I can login with my Steam, Uplay ... credentials on any PC I guess I also could play games on a different PC. I'm not sure but afaik the games are not tied to the PC but to the account. Consider this: Person 1 locks into Steam on PC1 and starts RocketLeague. Person2 does the same on PC2 with his own credentials. They use the same installation as base but this would not be much different when Person2 logs into steam on PC1.
    – pr0pofol
    Feb 12, 2019 at 15:17
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    @pr0pofol I'm not trying to accuse you of anything. My point is mainly that if playing this way is supported, there should be documentation about how to do it. If it's not supported, it may or may not lead to consequences from the developers, so you may want to check their terms & conditions before you do it.
    – Steve-O
    Feb 12, 2019 at 15:23

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