Epic Games has retooled the Epic Games Store to feel less like molasses in an igloo, and the company says it's now "46% faster than Steam" thanks to the power of partially AI-generated code.
"We vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher to be faster than the other guy," Epic says in a recent Twitter post. Attached is a graph claiming that the EGS launcher now has a "cold start to store" time of 5.47 seconds, which is about 4.6 seconds faster than the 10.07 seconds recorded for Steam. It's unclear in what system environment these figures were measured.
The time it takes to "restore from system tray to library," meanwhile, is allegedly a whole 0.06 seconds faster than Steam. The Epic Games Store really did feel cumbersome to use, but when you're visualizing a 0.06 second gain, I fear you've lost the plot a bit.
This overhaul will seemingly make good on promises Epic made at the start of the year, and this news follows the company's "huge pivot" into "maximum AI acceleration" across its business. This, itself, comes on the heels of an Unreal Engine 6 reveal that showed off a whole load of gen AI tools.
CEO Tim Sweeney insists "the aim isn't to do the same stuff with fewer people, but to enable everyone here to build MORE and BETTER stuff, and to bring the benefits to all teams using Unreal." Sweeney oversaw more than 1,000 layoffs at Epic earlier this year and blamed "downturn in Fortnite engagement."
The updated page for the Epic Games Store preview boasts of "a cleaner framework" and "faster startup and switching" across the board. Long-requested features like a "recent games" list will now be "easily available" in the launcher, Epic promises; a download hub centralizes games and downloads with live speeds, and figures like playtime and install date are displayed in the "activity feed."
Additionally, the EGS library now supports detailed and grid views, visualized search, collection groups, and is purportedly "30x faster."
"Is this bad boy faster? Yes," Epic adds. "Will it have some bugs? Yes. Do we want to hear about them? Hell yes."
Months ago, Epic enlisted the help of Blizzard's Battle.net lead to help get the Epic Games Store on track.
