Epic Games brought Christmas early for the Krita team , as a few days ago (before Christmas) the American video game development company best known for its super hit game "Fortnite", donated $25 to the Krita project.
This is all part of Epic Games' initiative to provide financial support for open source projects , and this time it was Krita's turn. The donated amount will be used to develop the graphics editor, which is being developed for artists and illustrators.
For those unfamiliar with Krita , it's worth noting that the editor supports multi-layer image processing, provides tools for working with various color models, and has a large set of tools for digital painting, drawing, and texture creation.
The donation was made as part of the Epic MegaGrants initiative , during which $100 million is planned to be spent on grants for game developers, content creators, and developers of toolkits related to Unreal Engine or open source projects useful to the 3D community.
It should be remembered that, in July of this year, Epic Games donated $1.2 million to the Blender Foundation to promote the development of the “Creative Software Suite Blender”.
These funds received by the Blender Foundation will be distributed in stages over the next three years. The money is planned to be used to expand the development team, attract new participants, improve project coordination, and enhance code quality (you can learn more about this in the following link ).
Another open-source project that benefited from the Epic MegaGrants initiative was Lutris (a FOSS game manager exclusively for Linux platforms). Epic Games' donation was also based on their strong interest in ensuring the Epic Games Store runs as stably as possible on Linux.
The funds received will continue to improve the platform as a whole, but in particular towards the development of tools that guarantee the stability of the games or launchers installed through Lutris.
As for the announcement from the Kirta team, they simply shared their gratitude towards Epic Games:
Epic, the makers of the Unreal game engine, have supported Krita with a $ 25,000 MegaGrant!
Epic has supported other free software projects, such as Blender and Lutris before, and is now compatible with Krita. The purpose of this grant is to fund improvements to our development process to make Krita's development more sustainable. This is something that we have already started on and that we want to accelerate. With an estimated five million users, it is very important to ensure that we can release as stable a version of Krita as possible in the most reliable way possible!
This donation to Krita represents funding for at least 10 months, which the developers have committed to using to improve the tool and their work, as the money will be spent on developing the next stable version of Krita.
Tim Sweeney (founder of Epic Games) has gone all out in 2019, expressing his love for free software in the best way possible: by supporting it with donations. We hope that many more projects will be supported through the Epic MegaGrants initiative and that Krita can continue to receive this support to improve its tool.
This year has ended, and in the coming new year we hope that more news like this from Epic Games will continue to surprise and delight many users online, as the donation to Krita was very well received by users and internet users on social networks and forums.
And what do you think about it, what other free software project do you think should be supported?