Previously, the head of Epic Games had quite harsh comments about the Microsoft Store, but the situation has changed…
In 2016, Tim Sweeney said about the UWP (Universal Windows Platform, allowing Windows 10 games to run on Xbox One and vice versa) that we should „fight” against it, and in July 2016, he also said that Steam would be made worse and worse on Windows 10 so that Microsoft would push its own Store with it. Since then, nearly three years have passed, and Epic Games now has its proprietary digital games store, which affects Linux negatively, too. (We’ll get back to it later.)
„Epic is thrilled with everything Microsoft is doing and we feel that we couldn’t be happier with the directions they’ve taken on all their platforms. There’s HoloLens, now an open platform. There’s Windows, a completely open platform. And Microsoft is launching new Microsoft services of all sorts through the Windows Store. And then there’s also Microsoft Game Pass. And those are existing side by side with everybody else’s services. And it’s a really healthy ecosystem, which everybody participates in.
And then there is Xbox. Consoles are a unique thing. They are television-attached gaming devices, as opposed to like general computing platforms. You’re not doing spreadsheets there. And so it was a different experience and also generally consoles over their history are subsidized hardware and so the hardware recoups some money from software sales. Epic is completely satisfied that their economic models are fair. If a bunch of developers get together and decided to make a console, we would probably do something similar. Funding hardware through software is a completely sensible plan. Epic loves Microsoft. Epic hearts Microsoft,” Sweeney told VentureBeat. Notice the stark difference to Sweeney’s 2016 comments…
But back to this Linux thought: this video mentions how Epic has acquired Kamu, the developers of Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC). This is the reason why a few games, such as Rust from Facepunch, is no longer getting further support on Linux. Since the acquisition, EAC and Valve haven’t worked much together on making EAC support on Linux, Steam Play, and Proton (which is created Valve to easily make Steam games supported on Linux with no extra effort). In short, Epic Games – until they create the Linux build for Epic Games Store, which isn’t going to happen any time soon due to a lack of capacity on their end… – has cut Linux users from a huge chunk of games.
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