[Announcement] Discontinuation of development for Gameyfin v1

TL;DR: Gameyfin v1 will only receive bug fixes and security patches from now on - Gameyfin v2 is in development, but will take time.

Gameyfin was and is a tool inspired by Grifter to easily manage and distribute games for LAN parties. It fulfills this purpose very well and for many users the functionality of the software is sufficient. In recent months, however, it has become clear that a large number of users would also like more from Gameyfin in order to make it a fully comprehensive management tool for their very own game library. While implementing a new feature (dynamic configuration) I noticed that due to design decisions made at the beginning of the development, the integration of additional features is much more difficult than it should be: Gameyfin has been built around IGDB's API, so it is not possible to (easily) integrate other metadata sources. The choice of technologies used was strongly influenced by my knowledge and interests at that time and today I would choose differently in some aspects.

This means that I will now discontinue development on Gameyfin v1. However, this does not mean the complete end of Gameyfin: I have started working on Gameyfin v2, which will (hopefully) fix the shortcomings and integrate lessons learned from the development of version 1. Gameyfin v2 will be a complete rewrite, especially the frontend will be more modern and beautiful. The admin interface will be completely expanded (currently it is just a kind of placeholder for functions that never came).

Gameyfin v2 will have the following new additional features on release (in addition to the existing functionality of Gameyfin v1):

• More modern UI with better accessibility features ✅
• More detailed documentation
• User management (incl. permission management) ✅
• SSO (most likely OICD) ✅
• Complete configuration in the UI instead of via environment variables ✅
• Support for various metadata sources based on plugins (which can also be developed by the community)
• Prometheus metrics

Some other features that are planned, but will probably not be part of the initial release of v2:

• Tracking of own metrics (played/not played, personal rating)
• Community features (e.g. recommend games to friends)
• Support for custom data (mods, save-games, ...)
• Support for additional download methods (SMB, local torrent)
• Better support for different platforms
• Better support for different versions of games in parallel

There are also some things that will (probably) never be integrated into Gameyfin:

• Client software (except plugins for clients like Playnite) and with that:
  • Tracking of playtime
  • Automatic installation
  • Achievements
• Download and import of games from the internet/usenet/torrents directly into Gameyfin (similiar to Radarr/Sonarr)

As you can see, several new features are planned, which will take time to develop. So please be patient, I will continue to maintain the project exclusively in my spare time and therefore have limited time. Bugs and security issues will be fixed, but no new features will be released. Currently there is no public release date of any beta or final versions planned. It will be ready when it's ready.

Thanks again for your great support (without it development would have stopped two years ago)!

• Simon (grimsi)

Here is a sneak peek of Gameyfin v2. Multi-user support (including role-based permissions) is already working 🙂 Still a lot of work ahead, especially the SSO and plugin parts are very complex.

Edit: removed preview due to being outdated

Since I finally found some time last week to continue my work on v2, I thought I would share an update with you. I'm currently finished the fundamental functionality such as user management, permissions and just today I implemented SSO via OAuth2/OIDC 😄

The frontend is looking very clean in my opinion and I am finally getting used to React. Spring Boot is a godsend as always and Kotlin is the cherry on top of it.

So there is stil quite some work ahead and I can't guarantee that I can sustain the pace I had for the last days since I had a lot more time than usual on my hands.

Anyway, here are a few quick previews for those of you who don't want to run a local dev instance 😉

Theming:

Login page (if not using SSO):

SSO:

User administration: