Ever since the announcement that it would be laying off 1,000 workers, Epic Games has been working overtime to pull users away from its largest competitor, Steam. Following the announcement that Epic Games had, seemingly out of the blue, figured out how to get Easy Anti-Cheat working on Linux to the same standard as its kernel-level implementation on Windows, Epic Games announced a new version of the Epic Games Launcher, with some interesting performance claims.
By Epic’s own admission, and in accordance with its latest proclamation of being an AI-first company with “no handwritten code,” the new Epic Games Launcher is vibe coded, but Epic Games claims that the new Epic Games Launcher launches up to 46% faster than Steam—5.47 seconds vs. 10.07 seconds—and restores from the system tray 14% faster than Steam—0.36 seconds vs. 0.42 seconds. The test results are an “average of 5 tests on each of 13 machines, excluding the 3 lowest-end machines tested,” and testing was conducted by Keywords Studio, an independent game studio contracted by Epic. The new Epic Games Launcher is available as a preview, and is admittedly still in testing, so there may be bugs.
Epic has made no other claims about the performance claims about the new vibe-coded Epic Games Launcher, but it promises an updated UI for game search and filtering, a customizable library and top bar, and less system resource usage when running in the background. It also purports to be a unified PC library, allowing you to “connect your PC libraries and see everything you own together within the Launcher,” similarly to how Steam allows adding external programs and games to user game libraries.
Epic Games encourages users to test the new Launcher, although it notes in the FAQ that it has not yet reached feature parity with the mainline Launcher version, although it is working towards it.