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.
Kimyrielle Nov 30, 2019
Quoting: yokem55That 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.
While that's true, EPIC is drowning in money. You can't sell me the idea that they're afraid of their shareholders throwing a hissy-fit over spending 0.000-something percent of their last-year's Fortnite bonanza on a dev working on a Linux port of their store. Shareholders care about things that matter, not something that leaves less impact on the bottom-line than their annual office Christmas party.
Quoting: GuestSupporting Lutris/WINE means they have no plans for supporting or releasing for Linux.That isn't news, though, they said that long ago.
This is... well, it is more than before, so that's a net positive.
Wine had no problem with easy anticheat before Epic bought it and ended development of the Linux version.
This isn't a problem that Wine needs to fix, it's entirely on Epic.
Quoting: derram>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 itPeople love to repeat this. EAC has never actually worked in Wine. Any time it did previously, was likely when EAC wasn't fully online. I've spoken to developers on this before. It has nothing to do with Epic buying EAC, don't spread it.
Wine had no problem with easy anticheat before Epic bought it and ended development of the Linux version.
This isn't a problem that Wine needs to fix, it's entirely on Epic.
Quoting: GuestSupporting Lutris/WINE means they have no plans for supporting or releasing for Linux.
Not to rain in the anti-epic parade (I still believe that they belong in the dog-house) but Valve supports WINE/DXVK and they do support releasing for Linux so I would say that the one is completely disconnected from the other.
Most likely this is $25k taken from their PR budget but it still have no bearing on whatever plans they have or not have for Linux in the future.
GustyGhost Nov 30, 2019
Quoting: mylkasweeny should give them the epic store source code, so they can make a linux version of it within lutris
If only there were some way to ensure people other than the author can have access to a program's source...
Mountain Man Nov 30, 2019
Doubting Lutris has a full time dev with 1,245 on patreon, that's for sure welcome.
After other platforms for gaming on linux, Lutris really has come a long way and it's a great platform. It's just well deserved they get some funding too, and if they can use it for funding their platform or even some development - the better.
I personally was very sceptical about Lutris in the beginning, but they really worked towards making it a platform and not a game launcher as others before them.
Well deserved, and I hope they'll continue their great job on the platform. It's a great tool for gamers who don't want to fiddle too much with wine configs (as me :D).
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