Epic Games is planning a native Linux version of their store launcher (not in the upcoming preview), as more work is needed beyond just a native build (AMA, answered by Epic employee @1percentnachos)

mr_MADAFAKA@lemmy.ml · 13 days ago

Epic Games is planning a native Linux version of their store launcher (not in the upcoming preview), as more work is needed beyond just a native build (AMA, answered by Epic employee @1percentnachos)

thingsiplay@lemmy.ml · 13 days ago

So that means they start taking Linux seriously. Hopefully it does mean their games like Fortnite will support Linux too. For me the bridge is already burned and I don’t want to build it again. But I’m not the only person in the world and therefore this is only a good step in the right direction.

Also nice to see they get user reviews soon, lol. The images and post content from the linked Reddit post, in case you avoid Reddit:

From Reddit: Epic Games Store roadmap for 2026 and more screenshots of launcher rebuild

Profiles look to finally be coming, third party patch notes among other big things. Some interesting things noticed on some of the pictures, picture 2 you can see “Controller support” and mentions Xbox and PlayStation controllers. There’s also a section to see “how my rig plays it?” suggesting it’ll show what settings you should be able to run the game at. You can also see on that picture that it mentions how many people have reviewed Arc Raiders so it seems like reviews will be getting overhauled too

Also seems to show what games your friends are playing

Things noticed in the pictures to look forward to imo:

Profiles and Avatars
Written reviews
Universal Controller support
Spec benchmarking (using hardware and the games spec sheet?)
Third Party Communities (forums??)
Third Party Patch Notes
Cross Region gifting
Publisher Funded Coupons

It’s also been confirmed there will be a Public Beta for the new launcher that will be announced through the discord server

EDIT:

The Epic employee that done the presentation is in the discord server and left a comment regarding the benchmarking for the new launcher and confirms that they’re not solely testing on the insane build mentioned in the slide:

There’s a lot of noise in the subreddit on the machine I used to test the launcher build on. We have been testing it across the 16 most common machine specs and the results are largely the same. When I was putting my slides together, I didn’t have the official benchmarks from our testing partner. The new launcher RIPS and it does not matter what machine you’re on. I’m really excited to get it to you all. (We’ve already started on the public build, just in burndown and lots of QA.)

Also it has been confirmed that the launcher is no longer being built with Unreal Engine, the underlying technology isn’t known but my guess is something to do with Rust as the newly announced SVC that Epic announced “Lore” is also built on Rust so might be some company wide initiative to use these kinds of tech, that’s just a guess though