A while back I mentioned that I was retooling bits of my network and gaming PC so I could run my less-often used games from a network share rather than having to go to the hassle of making space and downloading if I want to play an older game (and I admit that physically possessing things I paid for was another reason). This idea evolved as I used it, and now most of my PC games are running from a network share.
TL;DR - DCS isn’t going to work, but you could keep your older games installed in case you want to come back to them occasionally
If you’re interested in doing this, there’s a few things you should know. To start with, Windows 11 has a lot of “security features” designed to protect you, one of those largely prevents you from running software from “untrusted” spaces. To get around this you need to add your NAS to the “Local Intranet”.
How to add a site to the Local Intranet zone in Windows 11:
- Open the “Settings” app
- Click “Network and Internet” in the left panel
- Click “Advanced Network Settings” (you may need to scroll down, it’s the last option)
- Scroll down to “Related Settings” and click “Internet Options”
- Click the “Security” tab in the window that appears
- Click on the “Local Intranet”
- Click the “Sites” button
From here you can try automatically detecting the intranet network, but this didn’t work for me (I’m using Linux fileservers). To add a specific server:
- Click the “Advanced” button
- Add your fileserver’s IP address (e.g. 192.168.1.x) or UNC share name (e.g. \\COMPUTER_NAME)
After doing that I’ve had pretty good success getting games running from the server share:
- Anything using an emulator, such as DosBox, just runs. I also have the DosBox Game Launcher application on the server (mainly so I can have it automatically backed up, that’s not something I’m going to detail here)
- Most games installed from the Epic Games Store just work - the only problem I had was with Dragon Age Inquisition which didn’t actually install from Epic Games Store, it opened the EA app and installed the game from there and the EA app refuses to work with UNC or network shares
- A lot of games on Steam just work, with the exceptions again being things that require launchers (and it’s weird: for example Ghost Recon Breakpoint works fine but Ghost Recon Wildlands doesn’t, and the original Borderlands works fine but the Game Of The Year edition includes a launcher that doesn’t work unless you install it on the PC)
- Anything from GoG that you install by the Offline Backup Game Installers just works
There are some multiplayer games that will install but won’t work because of the DRM used (for example the new Delta Force game) and some of the older BattleEye games won’t work for the same reason. But there are plenty of multiplayer games that work just fine, for example Darktide and Insurgency Sandstorm.
Finally, we should talk about network speed and disk speed. I use a 2.5Gbps network and when I can saturate that network I’m basically getting similar loading speeds to what I’d get off a SATA SSD like I had in the mid 2010s. This is obviously fine for games from that era, but more modern games can take a long time to load in at this data rate. I’m going to specifically point out DCS here - that game won’t run nicely from the share because it streams data from the disk and you get some stuttering in VR (which I can’t deal with - it makes me feel ill). But to make a counter example, IL2 Flying Circus and MSFS2020 work fine from the network share - I don’t even notice a long loading time from IL2.
If you have a gigabit (1 Gbps) network: back-of-napkin math suggests you’ll get the same loading times you’d get from a SATA HDD (the ones with the spinning platters), and I don’t think that’s going to be acceptable for most people.
Disk speed in your NAS is a whole thing… you need to make sure your NAS can saturate your network
I don’t think a consumer NAS with a bunch of spinning-rust HDDs is going to give you performance you can live with, even if it has a 2.5 or 10 Gbps network card in it. My setup follows:
The volume is a ZFS drive containing the following vdevs:
- Data vdev: 6x 8TB IBM SAS HDDs in RAID-Z2
- Special vdev: 2x 1tb nvme SSDs, for metadata and small blocks up to 64KB
The gaming fileserver VM has its own 2.5 Gbps network card, so it is not blocking other server traffic.
This can routinely saturate a 2.5 Gbps link - around 280 MB/s - even with mixed filesize transfers thanks to the small_data_blocks storage on the Special vdev.
And finally, if you’re using consumer networking gear it’s best to make sure your NAS and your gaming PC are on the same switch so that when your PC is loading a game it isn’t basically blocking other traffic over the pathway between switches. Obviously if you’ve got a bunch of racked up gear with 10Gbps or 25Gbps links between switches you know what you’re doing 
when I reveal my ignorance and say “please explain”… That is a bit of an Aussie ‘in joke’ that I am sure 