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WINNITRON ARCADE NETWORK

Thanks for your interest in the Winnitron Network!

The Winnitron project is intended to to help indie game developers and communities who are interested in showcasing their games in public arcade cabinets around the world. The Winnitron is made up of three parts: your arcade cabinet, the Winnitron Launcher, and the Winnitron Network.

Your Arcade Cabinet

You'll need one of these for this whole thing to work! It's basically a box with arcade controls and a Windows computer stuffed inside it and the Winnitron Launcher installed on it.

We've found that having a Winnitron in a public location like a pub is a great way to expose people who wouldn't necessarily play these sorts of games to grab their attention, or just to have some fun. You can use it to advertise a smaller portion of a larger game, for example, like Nidhogg does - where you can play one level against a friend but the full version available on Steam has multiple levels and more features.

The Winnitron Launcher

This is a front end program (Windows-only atm 😓) that manages your game libraries and handles running the games. You can download it for free from GitHub and use it as a local-only machine, but the real power is hooking it up to the Winnitron Network where the launcher will automatically download the games you have assigned to it.

The Winnitron Network

The fanciest way of managing the games on your arcade machine! It's a centralized place on the web where you can manage the games that your Winnitron will automatically download.

The Network is where gamedevs the world 'round can upload their games for anyone to play on their Winnitrons. Anyone can upload a game or create their own playlist of games - and those people with a Winnitron can subscribe their arcade machine to any number of those playlists in order to choose which games are playable on their machine. The Launcher takes care of all the dirty work: just assign playlists to your Winnitron via the website, and it will automatically update the lists of available games between play sessions. Magic!