Epic has launched a brand new model of the Epic Games Launcher, with a preview model of the corporate’s refreshed Steam competitor accessible to obtain now.
This new Epic Games Launcher, which was constructed utilizing AI and “vibe coding”, is at the moment within the early phases of growth and so is “mild on options” in keeping with a new blog post from Epic. The preview model options the core parts you’d anticipate from a launcher, together with retailer, library, and social panels, in addition to the Unreal-focused developer web page.
“It has been rebuilt solely from the bottom up,” defined Martin Keely, vice chairman and common supervisor of Epic Games Retailer, in an interview with IGN. “So this can be a fully new tech stack, an entire new rewrite of each the shell, which has the obtain supervisor, library, and the app itself, in addition to the brand new retailer structure. So options like uncover and product element pages, these have all been rewritten.”
By way of enhancements, for this primary section of the rebuild the large focus has been on velocity. Epic says that the launcher boots from chilly in 5.47 seconds, which it claims is 46% sooner than Steam. When re-opening the app from the system tray, it takes simply .36 seconds – 14% sooner than Steam. These instances will certainly fluctuate relying in your system specs, however in ultimate circumstances it does seem the brand new app is way speedier than its sluggish predecessor.
“The library hundreds 30 instances sooner [than in the previous launcher],” mentioned Keely. “The startup is twice as quick. And it is a small footprint, solely 300mb. That was one other factor that we needed to proceed to make as small as attainable to help the big selection of {hardware} that gamers have.”
For this new model of the launcher, Epic is supporting Home windows, MacOS, and, for the primary time, Linux. That additionally signifies that Fortnite is coming to Linux, though it’s not accessible fairly but – Epic first must rebuild its Easy Anti-Cheat system for the platform. “As soon as it’s working with a crucial mass of distro maintainers, we’ll carry Fortnite to Linux through the Epic Games Launcher,” defined Epic’s weblog submit.
Past the velocity and platform upgrades, the brand new launcher options some much-needed high quality of life enhancements, akin to higher customisation – the brand new high bar will be adjusted to show the tabs so as of choice, and the library will be filtered utilizing quite a lot of classes.
By way of what future updates will supply, Keely revealed that “the opposite piece that we’ll be engaged on is the way to enhance recreation discovery in a means that’s related to every participant. We’ve a pretty big library and typically there’s nice video games that shall be related for somebody, so ensuring that we proceed to enhance the merchandising parts of how we make recreation discovery extra attainable and make that extra social so that folks can advocate video games to one another and make that straightforward to share.”
Epic had beforehand detailed its plans for a brand new launcher earlier this yr, the place it mentioned that its efforts would end in 5 instances sooner boot instances. In fact, whereas velocity is a matter, it could properly take greater than that to persuade gamers – some stay satisfied that the Epic Games Retailer won’t ever be pretty much as good as Steam.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Govt Editor of Options.