New Epic Games Launcher is 46% faster than Steam, ‘30x faster’ than before!

It is a well-known fact in the gaming community just how slow the Epic Games Launcher is, or in this case, how slow it used to be. Epic has tried in various ways to attract players, and I am certain that absolutely everyone knows about the countless high-quality titles they have given away on their platform over the years. However, no matter what titles they shared and to what extent, they never managed to convince users to stay on their platform. That might change now.

The new launcher was completely built with the help of AI and is currently still in the early stages of development, so it does not contain all the features and functionality that the company plans to implement, as stated on their blog. Of course, that does not mean it is non-functional; you still have all the essential components that make up a launcher, such as the store and library.

“It's been rebuilt entirely from the ground up,” explained Martin Keely, vice president and general manager of Epic Games Store, who spoke to IGN. “So this is a completely new tech stack, a complete new rewrite of both the shell, which has the download manager, library, and the app itself, as well as the new store architecture. So features like discover and product detail pages, those have all been rewritten.”

The best news of all is that the primary focus of initial improvements was on speed. Judging by the data they provided, the Epic Games Launcher now boots up in 5.47 seconds, which, according to them, is almost 50% faster than Steam. Naturally, this speed will largely depend on the system configuration it runs on, but we can at least conclude that we are looking at a substantially faster launch. According to Keely, the library loads an astonishing 30 times faster.

“The library loads 30 times faster [than in the previous launcher],” said Keely. “The startup is twice as fast. And it's a small footprint, only 300mb. That was another thing that we wanted to continue to make as small as possible to support the wide range of hardware that players have.”

That is not the end of the new additions. As Keely noted, alongside the standard Windows and macOS, Epic will also support Linux, which can mean only one thing—Fortnite is coming to Linux as well. However, that work is not finished yet, so we will have to wait a bit longer.

This is positive news, as competition is always beneficial for the end user. Still, how all of this will impact the reputation and revenue generated by the launcher remains to be seen.