The Lutris team announced yesterday that Epic Games have now awarded them a sum of money from the Epic MegaGrants pot.
In the Patreon post, the Lutris team announced they've been awarded $25,000. While this might be quite a surprise to some, Tim Sweeney the CEO of Epic Games, did actually suggest they apply for it which we covered here back in April. To see it actually happen though, that's seriously awesome for the team building this free and open source game manager.
While it's a shame Epic Games have no current interest in officially supporting their store on Linux, at least this way the Lutris team has some extra funding towards getting it nicely running with Wine and their Lutris application.
As for what they're planning to to with the funding:
The funds received will go forward improving the platform as a whole but in particular towards the development of tools ensuring the stability of games or launchers installed through Lutris.
Lutris
Lutris has come a long way in a short time too. It's an extremely handy application, allowing you to sort through games gathered across multiple stores like Steam, GOG, Humble Store, plus Emulators and Wine/Proton for everything not available on Linux (like the Epic Store).
Running the Epic Games Store through Lutris/Wine doesn't mean every game will work though, that will depend on the individual game. Fortnite, for example, won't work at all due to the anti-cheat and it's likely going to take a long time before Wine gets to a stage where it can work with it. Still, it's nice to see steps like this taken by Epic Games.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I don't know what the current Lutris state of EGS integration is, but if this leads to a very good usability, it might actually make EGS more interesting to some.
Schattenspiegel Nov 30, 2019
It does not really heal the harm they caused to Linux gaming (pulling games with Linux support exclusively to their non-Linux-store), but it is a nice move anyways.
So lets be friendly and thank them, it is a move in the right direction and every way to go starts with the first (small?) step.
Perhaps Mr. Sweeney can be more linuxfriendly in the future. I can remember, that EPIC once was a linuxfriendly company.
Last edited by einherjar on 30 November 2019 at 12:06 pm UTC
"Here's some pocket change, now leave us alone ..."
I guess we should be supportive of any engagement with the community, but I'm just very cynical about Epic.
Quoting: pete910Whilst great for lutris, Surely 25k would have covered the cost of making their game launcher/client run native along with fortnite ? Or at least a good way toward it .That might be enough to fund a small team for a few weeks to get a proof of concept build of the store out. But once you start getting a QA process rolling and either adding a proton like infrastructure or supporting native ports in the store, then the costs go way up in the context of a big company of people with decent salaries.
And in those kinds of companies (especially ones with public shareholders or outside investors) the costs have to have a compelling ROI model. Valve can do what they do precisely because they are incredibly profitable and privately owned.
The lutris grant is a pretty good start to fund a community supported approach. Obviously it's not ideal for us. But improving the tooling around the wine ecosystem can't hurt.
Quoting: yokem55Quoting: pete910Whilst great for lutris, Surely 25k would have covered the cost of making their game launcher/client run native along with fortnite ? Or at least a good way toward it .That might be enough to fund a small team for a few weeks to get a proof of concept build of the store out. But once you start getting a QA process rolling and either adding a proton like infrastructure or supporting native ports in the store, then the costs go way up in the context of a big company of people with decent salaries.
And in those kinds of companies (especially ones with public shareholders or outside investors) the costs have to have a compelling ROI model. Valve can do what they do precisely because they are incredibly profitable and privately owned.
The lutris grant is a pretty good start to fund a community supported approach. Obviously it's not ideal for us. But improving the tooling around the wine ecosystem can't hurt.
I said native version of their client, I said nothing regards adding things like proton. Somehow I can't see it taking a team of "good" devs to get what they have now running native .
I see what you are saying though , does seem more like a buy off rather than a legitimate funding grant.
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