Epic has released a new version of the Epic Games Launcher, with a preview version of the company’s refreshed Steam competitor available to download now.
This new Epic Games Launcher, which was built using AI and “vibe coding”, is currently in the early stages of development and so is “light on features” according to a new blog post from Epic. The preview version features the core components you’d expect from a launcher, including store, library, and social panels, as well as the Unreal-focused developer page.
“It’s been rebuilt entirely from the ground up,” explained Martin Keely, vice president and general manager of Epic Games Store, in an interview with 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.”
In terms of improvements, for this first phase of the rebuild the big focus has been on speed. Epic says that the launcher boots from cold in 5.47 seconds, which it claims is 46% faster than Steam. When re-opening the app from the system tray, it takes just .36 seconds – 14% faster than Steam. These times will surely vary depending on your system specs, but in ideal conditions it does appear the new app is much speedier than its sluggish predecessor.
“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.”
For this new version of the launcher, Epic is supporting Windows, MacOS, and, for the first time, Linux. That also means that Fortnite is coming to Linux, although it’s not available quite yet – Epic first needs to rebuild its Easy Anti-Cheat system for the platform. “Once it’s working with a critical mass of distro maintainers, we’ll bring Fortnite to Linux
Beyond the speed and platform upgrades, the new launcher features some much-needed quality of life improvements, such as better customisation – the new top bar can be adjusted to display the tabs in order of preference, and the library can be filtered using a variety of categories.
In terms of what future updates will offer, Keely revealed that “the other piece that we’re going to be working on is how to improve game discovery in a way that is relevant to each player. We have a pretty large library and sometimes there’s great games that will be relevant for someone, so making sure that we continue to improve the merchandising components of how we make game discovery more possible and make that more social so that people can recommend games to each other and make that easy to share.”
Epic had previously detailed its plans for a new launcher earlier this year, where it said that its efforts would result in five times faster boot times. Of course, while speed is an issue, it may well take more than that to convince players – some remain convinced that the Epic Games Store will never be as good as Steam.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.
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