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.
Quoting: GrifterI said about this before, but I will say it again: I fully suspect their wording is because it will be going free to play, which is why they're saying it will be supported.Quoting: Liam DaweSeriously, where do people keep coming up with this? They did not say it would no longer be purchasable on Steam.
From Psyonix, they've chosen their words carefully and said for now, until it hits EGC it will remain as is on steam, and afterwards anyone who owns it will still be able to play it on steam. Well anyway, I guess we'll see when the time comes.
EDIT: And that would actually jive more with the decision to remove the DLC from the platforms, and put everything into the client as ingame purchases.
Last edited by Grifter on 1 December 2019 at 4:12 pm UTC
Doc Angelo Dec 1, 2019
Quoting: GuestSupporting Lutris/WINE means they have no plans for supporting or releasing for Linux.
That's what I'm thinking too. Moreover, I imagine that Epic is grooming Lutris to become an Epic games on Linux by proxy. I imagine $25k will go a long way to improving Lutris for a lot less than it would cost Epic to offer equal support for Linux in-house.
orochi_kyo Dec 2, 2019
I do use Lutris but whats is funny here is how WINE/Proton/DXVK arent receiving Tim money.
We sure live in a twisted world, it is justified to take money from the same who actually wants to take PC gaming 15 years back?
Have a good day.
appetrosyan Dec 3, 2019
To give you an analogy of how disappointing this news is, think of a headline “a gamer donated £25 to the Linux foundation”. Don’t give them coverage.
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