Heroic Games Launcher continues to evolve into an even more impressive cross-platform game launcher for GOG, Epic Games, Amazon Prime and more with v2.16 bringing some great enhancements.

Probably the biggest change is it’s now using the UMU project as a default. This project is meant to make sure that games will run without the user having to individually troubleshoot or manually install components.

Right now, there are many windows games that run perfectly if launched from steam, but if you try running the same game from epic/gog it won’t work without further work. The UMU project is building a game database of what specific games need to work, and it will automatically resolve those issues. This will only get better over time as more games get added to their database.

There are a lot of other changes as well, I recommend checking out the article for some other highlights or checking out the full patch notes here

  • @twistypencil
    2•14 hours ago

    Would this replace lutris for installing windows games?

    • @[email protected]English
      1•26 minutes ago

      Its main goal is to be a frontend for Epic, GOG, and Amazon games. It does also support manually adding games, so you can use it similarly to Lutris if you’d like. They support most of the same features, so its just preference.

    • @[email protected]
      1•3 hours ago

      This is like 100x better than Lutris. I’ve been using it for a very long time. It’s just fantastic once you get the hang of it.

    • FubarberryOPMEnglish
      5•14 hours ago

      It’s specifically for installing windows games from Epic, GoG, and Amazon. You can sync your libraries from those platforms and manage all your games you own there.

      I’m not sure how well it would work for installing windows games that aren’t from one of those stores.

      Heroic is probably the most full featured way to install games from those platforms, but you can also use other launchers like junk store (which is a Decky plugin for installing Epic games directly inside of game mode), non-steam launchers, and more.

      • @[email protected]
        2•2 hours ago

        It works just fine for installing windows games that aren’t from those sources, it’s just less seamless. If UMU has the game in its DB, then the game will still benefit regardless of the store it was acquired from

    • @[email protected]
      2•14 hours ago

      No. It’s an alternative, just like how Bottles is an alternative to either of those. I like Heroic, but use the launcher(s) you like.

      • @twistypencil
        1•14 hours ago

        As an alternative, does that mean it can replace lutris for installing windows games?