Epic Games claims its new “vibe coded” launcher runs 46% faster than Steam from cold start to store page
Epic Games has released a beta version of its new launcher, claiming significant performance improvements over Valve’s Steam. According to the company, the launcher starts approximately 46% faster than Steam from cold startup to the store page, with an additional 14% speed advantage when restoring from system tray to library. The new launcher delivers dramatically faster library load times—30 times faster than its predecessor—and startup times roughly half that of the previous version.
The lightweight design consumes only 300MB of storage. Epic Games VP Martin Keely told IGN that Steam requires roughly 10 seconds to boot, while Epic’s new launcher achieves startup in approximately 5 seconds. The development process leveraged AI as a tool to enable a smaller team to rewrite the codebase and accelerate cross-platform deployment, with “vibe coded” used to describe this development approach.
However, the performance gap may already be narrowing. Valve released a substantial Steam update addressing performance optimization—directly targeting the very area where Epic was claiming superiority. The well-timed update suggests Steam’s improvements have substantially closed the performance differential, potentially undermining one of Epic’s primary selling points for its platform.