Epic Games Launcher: 46% Faster Than Steam [2026]

Epic Games unveiled a redesigned Epic Games Launcher in preview on October 14, 2026, and the headline number is hard to ignore: the company says the rebuilt client starts up 46% faster than Steam, measured from a cold boot to the storefront page. Epic also disclosed that the new launcher was, in its own words, “vibe coded,” meaning large portions of the rewrite leaned on generative AI tools rather than being hand written line by line. For a company that has spent years trying to chip away at Valve’s dominance of PC gaming distribution, speed and a new look are the opening argument.

The claim, first detailed by The Verge, landed alongside a preview build available for Windows, macOS, and, notably, Linux. GamesIndustry.biz was among the first outlets to confirm the specific benchmark figures Epic is publishing, and within hours the story had spread across nearly every major gaming and technology outlet. This is a genuine shift in how Epic is trying to compete, not just on exclusivity deals and revenue share cuts, but on the basic mechanics of opening an app and finding a game to buy.

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The Numbers Behind Epic’s 46% Faster Claim

Epic’s performance claims rest on two specific measurements. The first, and the one getting the most attention, is cold start time: how long it takes the launcher to go from a dead stop, no background process running, to a usable store page. Epic says the new Epic Games Launcher completes that trip in 5.47 seconds, compared to 10.07 seconds for Steam under the same test conditions. That gap is where the 46% faster figure comes from, and it is a big enough difference that anyone who has sat waiting for a launcher to load before buying a game will notice.

The second measurement is less dramatic but still notable: restoring the launcher from the system tray, the quick reopen most PC gamers actually do dozens of times a day rather than a true cold start. Here Epic claims 0.36 seconds against Steam’s 0.42 seconds, a 14% improvement. It is a smaller percentage gap, but because this is the interaction users hit most often, even a fraction of a second matters when it is multiplied across millions of sessions.

Benchmark	New Epic Games Launcher	Steam	Epic’s Claimed Improvement
Cold start to store page	5.47 seconds	10.07 seconds	46% faster
System tray restore to library	0.36 seconds	0.42 seconds	14% faster
Library load time vs previous Epic launcher	Reported 30 times faster	Not applicable	Comparison is to Epic’s own prior client

It is worth being precise about what that last row means. The “30 times faster” figure is not a comparison against Steam at all, it is Epic comparing its new launcher against the library loading speed of its own previous, widely criticized client. Conflating that number with the Steam comparison would overstate the case, so it is kept here as its own line.

Who Actually Ran the Tests

Benchmark claims from a company about its own product always invite scrutiny, and Epic has tried to get ahead of that by naming who ran the numbers. According to TechPowerUp, the testing was carried out by Keywords Studio, described as an independent game studio contracted by Epic for the benchmarking work. The methodology reportedly involved five test runs on each of 13 separate machines, with the three lowest end machines in that set excluded from the final averages.

That exclusion detail matters. Dropping the weakest hardware from a sample before averaging tends to flatter results, since low end machines are usually where launcher bloat and background processes cause the most visible slowdown. None of this means the 46% figure is wrong, but it does mean the number reflects a curated test environment rather than a random sample of every PC gamers actually own. PC Gamer flagged exactly this nuance, noting that while Epic says its technical improvements were verified by an external vendor, its own staff had not yet tested the client themselves at the time of publication.

What Keywords Studio’s Role Does and Does Not Confirm

Having a third party studio run the stopwatch is a step up from a company simply asserting its own numbers, but it is not the same as independent, publicly reproducible benchmarking by an outside reviewer with no commercial relationship to Epic. Keywords Studio was contracted for this work, which means Epic chose the tester, likely set or approved the test parameters, and controlled when and how the results were disclosed. Readers should treat the 46% and 14% figures as credible but company sponsored data points, not as a neutral third party audit in the way a hardware review site might run its own repeatable test suite.

What “Vibe Coded” Means for a Launcher Millions of People Use

The phrase doing the most damage control and the most marketing work simultaneously is “vibe coded.” Epic used the term itself to describe the development process behind the new client. The company’s own framing, reported by Tom’s Hardware, was blunt: “Programming is hard. So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher that’s way faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look.”

That is a striking thing for a major studio to say out loud about a tool used by tens of millions of PC gamers to manage purchases, patches, and payment information. “Vibe coding,” in the broader industry sense that has taken hold through 2025 and 2026, refers to a development style where a programmer or small team leans heavily on generative AI models to produce working code from natural language prompts, iterating quickly rather than writing and reviewing every line by hand. Epic’s own description lines up with that definition: AI assisted development used to rebuild a client that had grown bloated and slow over several years of feature accretion.

Martin Keely, vice president and general manager of the Epic Games Store, put the business case for that approach in terms of team size and speed rather than novelty for its own sake. He told GamesIndustry.biz that AI assisted development “made us more efficient and allowed a small team to rewrite the code base and be able to launch it faster across platforms, support Windows and Mac, and we’re going to have a Linux version as well.” He also acknowledged the sensitivity around the term directly, saying “it’s obviously an issue that’s of high visibility at the moment across the industry,” a nod to the ongoing debate in software circles about how much AI generated code should be trusted in production software that handles real money and real user accounts.

Martin Keely on Startup Speed and Library Loading

Keely’s comments give the most concrete picture of what actually changed under the hood, even without a full technical breakdown. On raw startup speed, he kept the framing simple, telling GamesIndustry.biz “the startup is twice as fast.” On the library, the part of the launcher most players stare at while waiting for game thumbnails and update status to populate, Keely said “the library loads 30 times faster,” referring to the previous launcher rather than Steam.

Those two statements, paired with the Keywords Studio benchmark figures, paint a consistent picture: Epic rebuilt the client from a different technical foundation rather than patching the existing one, and the biggest gains show up in the parts of the app that previously relied on older, heavier code for rendering the library and loading metadata. Whether a small internal team using AI assisted tooling can maintain that performance as new features get added back in over time is the open question nobody outside Epic can answer yet.

Windows, macOS, and a Linux Build That Actually Matters

The platform support list for the preview is specific and, for Linux gamers in particular, genuinely newsworthy. The build supports Windows 10 and 11, macOS 12 or newer, and for the first time, a Linux preview version, according to Thurrott. Epic Games Store has lacked a native Linux client for years even as Valve’s own SteamOS and Steam Deck pushed Linux gaming into the mainstream, so a working Linux build changes the calculus for anyone running a Steam Deck adjacent handheld or a Linux desktop who wanted Epic exclusives without jumping through compatibility layers.

That context matters for anyone currently weighing hardware choices in the handheld PC gaming space, where the operating system underneath the games often decides which storefronts are even usable without extra setup. Readers comparing handhelds directly, such as in our ROG Ally versus Steam Deck spec checklist, will want to watch whether Epic’s Linux build reaches feature parity on SteamOS style devices, since that has been one of the lingering gaps keeping some players tied to Steam by default rather than by preference.

Detail	Status in the Preview Build
Windows 10 and 11 support	Available now
macOS 12 or newer support	Available now
Linux support	Available in preview, first time offered
Full feature parity with the previous launcher	Not yet, described by Epic as light on features
Digital commerce shopping cart technology	Included, per Business Insider’s reporting
Independent third party performance verification	Not yet completed by several outlets covering the story

Why Epic Is Calling This Release “Light on Features”

Speed came at a cost, and Epic has not hidden that. According to Business Insider, the company described the first release as “light on features” in its own blog post announcing the launcher. That is a notable admission for a storefront that competes directly with Steam’s deep catalog of community features, from user reviews and curator pages to workshop integrations and a mature friends and chat system that has been refined for close to two decades.

The Shopping Cart Signal

What the preview does include, per that same reporting, is advanced digital commerce technology such as a shopping cart, a seemingly small addition that signals Epic’s priorities: checkout and purchasing flow got attention early, while social and community features appear to be queued for later updates. That sequencing makes sense for a company trying to win converts on the single biggest complaint lodged against the old launcher, raw sluggishness, before asking users to also adapt to a rebuilt social layer.

Steam’s Long Running Speed Problem and Why It Became a Target

Steam has carried a reputation among PC gamers for being resource heavy and occasionally sluggish on launch, a complaint that has followed Valve’s client through multiple visual overhauls over the years. That reputation is exactly what Epic is aiming at with its 46% figure. Rather than compete purely on exclusives or Epic’s long standing lower revenue share for developers, the company is now trying to win an argument about basic responsiveness, the kind of friction point that affects every single session rather than only purchase decisions.

It is a sensible pressure point because launcher speed is one of the few areas where Steam’s thirteen year head start and massive install base do not automatically protect it. A faster competing client does not require Epic to out market Valve’s community features or replicate the Steam Workshop, it just requires winning the stopwatch. Whether that argument moves any meaningful number of PC gamers away from Steam, where their existing libraries, achievements, and friends lists already live, is a separate and much harder question than whether the new launcher is objectively quicker to open.

The Historical Pattern: Epic Has Tried This Argument Before

Epic Games Store has spent years trying different angles to pull users and developers away from Steam. Free game giveaways built a large account base quickly after the store’s 2018 launch. Aggressive exclusivity deals with publishers brought complaints from players who wanted titles on their preferred platform. A friendlier revenue split for developers, long pitched as fairer than Valve’s standard cut, aimed at the supply side of the market rather than players directly. None of those approaches fully closed the gap with Steam’s dominant position in PC game sales and community features.

The vibe coded launcher represents a different kind of attempt: competing on the software experience itself rather than on business terms or exclusive content. It is also, notably, the first time Epic has framed an AI assisted development process as a selling point rather than a background detail, which places this release at the intersection of two separate industry stories, the Epic versus Steam rivalry and the broader debate over how much production software should be built with AI generated code.

Market Impact: What a Faster Launcher Could Actually Change

The practical market impact of a faster launcher is easy to overstate and easy to dismiss, and the truth likely sits in between. On one hand, launcher speed alone rarely drives a platform migration when a player’s purchase history, friends list, and saved settings already live somewhere else. On the other hand, speed and responsiveness shape daily habit formation in ways that matter more over months than in a single session. If the new Epic Games Launcher genuinely opens in roughly half the time of Steam, every single day, that adds up to a meaningfully different experience for anyone who splits their library across both platforms, which a large share of PC gamers already do.

For Epic specifically, a credible speed advantage also gives its sales and marketing teams a concrete, testable claim to put in front of publishers deciding where to list a new release, rather than relying solely on revenue share percentages. If outside reviewers confirm similar results once they run their own tests, expect Epic to lean on the comparison heavily in future storefront negotiations and marketing pushes around major releases.

The Skepticism Gap: What Reviewers Have Not Yet Verified

The most important caveat in this entire story is a simple one: as of the preview’s release, several of the outlets covering it had not yet run their own independent tests of the client. PC Gamer explicitly flagged that it had “yet to test the client” itself at the time of its report, even while relaying Epic’s figures. That is a meaningful gap between a company’s internal, contractor verified benchmark and a reproducible test that a reader could, in theory, run themselves on their own hardware.

None of this means the numbers are inflated. Keywords Studio’s involvement as a named, contracted third party is a real step toward credibility that plenty of corporate benchmark claims skip entirely. But until independent outlets publish their own side by side timing tests on a range of consumer hardware, rather than Epic’s curated 13 machine sample with the three weakest systems excluded, the 46% figure should be read as Epic’s best case claim rather than a settled, universally reproducible fact.

How This Fits the Broader Cloud and Client Gaming Comparison

Launcher performance is just one layer of how players actually access their games today, and it sits alongside a wider set of comparisons PC gamers already weigh constantly. Cloud gaming services like the ones compared in our breakdown of GeForce NOW against Shadow PC pricing remove the local client question almost entirely by streaming from remote hardware, while traditional storefronts like Epic and Steam still depend heavily on how quickly the local app itself responds. As handheld gaming PCs proliferate, the comparison in our Switch 2 versus ROG Xbox Ally X breakdown shows how much hardware variety now exists for running these launchers, which makes Epic’s claim of testing across 13 different machines, even with the weakest three excluded, a reasonable nod to that diversity rather than a single idealized gaming rig.

It also lands at a moment when console hardware sales have been sliding, as detailed in our coverage of PS5 and Xbox hardware sales hitting a 13 year low, which keeps more attention and spending concentrated on PC as the platform where storefront competition actually plays out in real time.

What Developers and Publishers Should Watch

For studios deciding where to launch a game, client performance has historically been a secondary concern behind revenue share, marketing support, and exclusivity terms. A faster, more responsive storefront does not change those economics directly, but it does remove one more excuse players have for avoiding a non Steam purchase. If Epic’s numbers hold up under independent testing, publishers negotiating platform deals gain a small but real talking point: friction at checkout and in daily use is lower than it used to be, which may matter at the margins for games that rely on day one impulse purchases driven by streamers or marketing pushes.

Developers should also pay attention to the shopping cart feature Business Insider reported on. A proper cart system, rather than Epic’s historically one click, one game at a time purchase flow, suggests Epic is building toward bundles, wishlists converting to multi item checkouts, and sale events that look more like a modern storefront than a bare bones game launcher.

Predictions: Where This Goes From Here

A handful of outcomes look likely as the preview period continues and more outlets run their own tests.

Expect at least one major hardware or gaming outlet to publish independent cold start and tray restore timing tests within weeks, since PC Gamer and others have already flagged that they have not yet run their own numbers.
Valve is unlikely to respond publicly to a competitor’s marketing claim, but do not be surprised if a quieter Steam client performance update follows in the months after, given Valve’s history of incremental client improvements.
The Linux preview build is likely to draw outsized attention from the SteamOS and Steam Deck community relative to its current user numbers, since a working non Steam storefront on Linux handhelds has been a long standing request.
Feature parity, including the community and social tools Epic has acknowledged are missing from this light on features release, will likely roll out in stages through the rest of 2026 and into 2027 rather than arriving all at once.
Epic will likely continue to frame “vibe coded” as a badge of engineering efficiency in future announcements, given how directly Martin Keely tied the AI assisted rewrite to the small team size that made the faster rollout possible.

Competitive Comparison: Epic’s Pitch Versus the Rest of the Field

Steam remains the default comparison because it is the storefront Epic explicitly benchmarked against, but it is not the only client competing for a spot on a PC gamer’s desktop. GOG Galaxy and Ubisoft Connect have both drawn similar complaints over the years about startup lag and background resource use, without either company publishing a comparable head to head benchmark against Steam. Battle.net has generally avoided the speed conversation entirely by focusing on its narrower, first party catalog. None of those competitors have made a public claim resembling Epic’s 46% figure, which makes this announcement unusual not just for its content but for the fact that a major storefront operator put a specific, falsifiable number in front of the press at all.

That willingness to publish a specific, checkable number is itself a competitive signal. It invites outlets to go test the claim, which is exactly what several publications, including PC Gamer, have indicated they intend to do once review time allows. If the numbers hold, Epic gains a rare, concrete marketing point in an industry where most storefront comparisons are subjective. If they do not hold up under independent conditions, Epic risks a credibility hit at a moment when it is also asking users to trust an AI assisted rewrite of software that manages their purchases and payment details.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does “vibe coded” mean for the new Epic Games Launcher?
Epic Games used the term to describe building the new client primarily with the help of generative AI tools rather than writing the entire codebase by hand. The company said doing so let a small team rewrite the launcher and ship it across Windows, macOS, and Linux faster than a traditional rewrite would have allowed.

How much faster is the new Epic Games Launcher than Steam?
Epic claims a 46% faster cold start, measured at 5.47 seconds versus Steam’s 10.07 seconds to reach the store page, and a 14% faster system tray restore time, at 0.36 seconds versus Steam’s 0.42 seconds. These figures come from testing Epic says was run by Keywords Studio, a contracted independent game studio.

Is the new Epic Games Launcher available to download now?
Yes, it is available now as a preview release rather than a final, stable build, according to multiple outlets including The Verge and Thurrott.

Which operating systems does the new Epic Games Launcher support?
The preview supports Windows 10 and 11, macOS 12 or newer, and for the first time, a Linux build, according to Thurrott’s reporting on the rollout.

Has anyone outside Epic independently verified the speed claims?
Not yet, as of the preview’s release. PC Gamer noted it had not personally tested the client at the time of its report, even while Epic says the figures were verified by a contracted third party vendor, Keywords Studio.

Does the new launcher include a shopping cart?
Yes, Business Insider reported that the preview build includes digital commerce technology such as a shopping cart, even though Epic has described this first release as light on features overall.

Is the new Epic Games Launcher better than Steam overall?
That depends on what matters most to an individual player. Epic’s own figures suggest faster startup and restore times, but the company has also acknowledged the preview lacks feature parity with its previous client, let alone Steam’s much larger set of community and social tools built up over nearly two decades.

When will the new Epic Games Launcher reach a stable, full release?
No confirmed release date has been announced. Epic has only described this as a preview version, and the company has not published a timeline for a final, feature complete release.

Epic Games Launcher Claims 46% Faster Than Steam [2026]