Steam PC Cafe, Operated by iGames

Once iGames has set up your Steam PC Café Site Server account and approved your application, (after you accept the invitation) follow these steps:

• Download the Steam PC Café Site Server once iGames has provided the download link.

• After downloading, unzip the server files to your hard drive.
  
  

• Navigate to the folder that the server files have been extracted to and double click steamcmd.exe
  
  

• Enter the Steam account credentials of your Steam Server account for the location.
  
  

• The first time you launch the server on a new machine, you will need to enter the Steam Guard code that will be sent to the email address associated with the Steam Server account.
  
  

• Log into your Steam Site Server, using your Steam PC Café Site Server information. This is the account you set up with iGames.

To run a Steam PC Café Server, you just need a secure Window 7, Windows 10, or Windows 11 PC connected to the location's network. You will also be able to run it on Windows Server 2012 R2 and 2016.

Yes, the feature will only be properly functioning if server and stations are on the same subnet. Packets are not forwarded to other subnets and only client machines that are in the same network (ethernet or wifi) will have access to the license pool and content cache feature.

This error usually indicates that the account used to run the PC Café Server has not been added to the site location on the Steamworks partner page yet. Please contact iGames.

The Steam PC Café Server uses UDP broadcast packets over port 27036 to announce itself to Steam clients on the network. The client machine must be able to receive those packets to know about the PC Café Server. Then, the Steam client will connect to the server using a TCP connection on port 27037. The server machine must allow TCP connections on that port. For a full list of other required ports and protocols for Steam see here.

The Steam PC Café Server will make sure that inactive Steam accounts will be logged off automatically after a certain time has passed. We strongly recommend that you do not turn off this feature, as it is very valuable for customers that have left the PC without logging out of their Steam account. If you do choose to deactivate this feature, we recommend that you let your customers know. To deactivate the feature, you will need to navigate to the server file location and open steamconsole.cfg with a text editor. Adding the following command line will deactivate the auto log off within your network, when the server is active: @bSiteLicenseAllowCachedClientCredentials 1

Minimal! You don't need a high-powered system — since we’re not using the caching feature with ggRock, it just needs to function as a floating license server to manage and meter out licenses to your client machines.

You can use any Windows OS — including Windows 11 Pro. No need for a dedicated Windows Server installation.

Yes! We can assist you in setting up a virtual machine that boots automatically with your ggRock server. This ensures that your clients always have access to their licenses via Steam PC Café, even in a virtual environment.

Not necessarily. If you already have a front desk or cashier PC that's always on, it can be used to host the Steam PC Café license server without needing additional hardware.

Generally, you don’t need to enable the caching feature—unless you're allowing customers to frequently download their own games.

In that case, caching can help improve performance—but only if the Steam iCafe app/cache is running on a system with serious storage capacity (think: high-speed SSDs or a dedicated caching server).

If you're just using ggRock for managed game images, caching isn't necessary and may just complicate things.