Epic MegaGrant gives $25,000 to Lutris, the open source gaming platform for Linux

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Congratulations to the Lutris team, who announced on Patreon that they were granted $25,000 from the Epic MegaGrant. In their announcement:

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For the project’s 10th birthday, I have a very special announcement to make! Lutris has been awarded $25,000 as part of the Epic MegaGrants initiative. With the Epic MegaGrants, Epic Games  are attributing a total of $100 million to projects and developers helping the gaming and 3D graphics ecosystem. I’m very glad that Epic chose to show their support for a gaming platform that is exclusively centered around Linux systems. Epic has been traditionally a publisher supportive of Linux, with ports of their flagship games Unreal Tournament 99, 2003 and 2004 being some of the most well known classic Linux games. The source availability of the Unreal Engine 4 has made it possible to have a native version of a modern graphics engine. In the recent years, there hasn’t been any kind of Linux related news coming from Epic, which had me worried that they might not consider this platform relevant anymore. This grant is a total game changer and I’m delighted to see Epic giving some consideration to Linux gaming.

Epic Games and Tim Sweeney himself are very interested in having the Epic Games Store run on Linux in the most stable way. While there are no immediate plans for a native version of the Epic Games Store, Lutris has become the easiest way to get a near native experience. 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. Currently, there is a test suite to ensure the Lutris client doesn’t break. In addition to that, we will  also be proving end to end integration tests making sure the platform as a whole keeps working in a consistent manner and across different distributions. End to end automated testing on a wider variety of systems will help us catch issues with the games themselves, as opposed to the client. In parallel, improvements will be made to the installer submission process as well as issue reporting for end users.  

I hope this grant also shows to the Linux community that Epic Games is still interested in the Linux platform. While Lutris has always been and remains a vendor agnostic platform, it’s good to see a big name backing us up, and by extension the whole Linux community at large. Ten years after the initial announcement of Lutris, it’s truly amazing and humbling to see how far we have gone, with projects like Mesa, Wine, Vulkan and DXVK constantly pushing the limits of what’s possible on our platform. The current experience is great, but there is always room from improvement. Thanks to everyone’s support, Lutris is dedicated to providing the smoothest experience for the largest number of users for the years to come!

Lutris is an open source gaming platform for Linux that installs and launches games without the hassle of setting up on Linux and without installing system libraries. Lutris includes Linux support for using platforms like GOG, Steam, Battle.net, Origin, Uplay and finally Epic Games Store, which is beginning to gain support on the platform. 

Despite this generous grant to a Linux project, it is interesting that Epic Games Store has no announced plans to lauch a native Linux client.

What other noteworthy projects have been given grants by Epic? Should PCGamingWiki apply for an Epic MegaGrant?