Epic releases AI-built launcher preview, claims faster start-up than Steam

[BadBunny]

Epic Games has released a preview of a redesigned Epic Games Launcher, built using AI assisted vibe coding. Tom's Hardware reports that Epic's blog post justifies the approach with the line programming is hard. It is a surprisingly candid way to describe a major software project, and it fits Tim Sweeney's description of Epic as an AI first company

Epic makes some bold performance claims. It says the new launcher starts 46 percent faster than Steam from a cold start, and returns from the system tray 14 percent faster, although that second gain is only about 0.06 seconds. It also claims the library loads 30 times faster but gave no details. The tests were run by Keywords Studios across 13 Windows setups

New features include individual library pages for each game, a single downloads page and collections for organising your library. Some social and account features are still missing, so this is not yet a complete replacement for the current launcher

Epic advises Unreal Engine developers and competitive Fortnite and Rocket League players to stay on the old launcher for now. The preview runs natively on Windows 10 and 11, macOS 12 or newer, and on Linux, with Ubuntu 22.04, Fedora 43 and Debian 12 supported. Native Linux support is a welcome change

The Epic launcher has long been criticised for being slow and clunky, so a faster, cleaner version would be very welcome. Whether it was built by hand or with AI matters less to players than whether it works well. The preview is a good chance for Epic to gather feedback before a full release

Will you try the preview? And does it matter to you how software like this is built?

Epic Games vibe codes new launcher becausewww.tomshardware.com