Epic Games has released a preview version of its new Epic Games launcher, and its origin story is rather candid — it was written using AI "vibe coding." The announcement on the Epic Games Store website pulls no punches: traditional programming was simply too hard, so the team let AI take over and produce a launcher that is faster, more responsive, and completely refreshed in its interface. The officials also jokingly reminded users not to expect too many features: "treat it as a speedboat, not a luxury yacht." Of course, "advanced digital commerce technology" such as the shopping cart was still fully equipped.
A 5.47-second cold start, nearly twice as fast as Steam
Speed is the hardest evidence. Epic revealed that the new store's cold start takes an average of only 5.47 seconds, 46% faster than Steam. Beyond booting up faster, switching between the game library and the store is smoother, it uses fewer background resources, and the library management and download experience have also been improved.
This leap had long been foreshadowed. At Unreal Fest this past June (6月), Epic announced its launcher overhaul plan, declaring that "every developer and player has suffered through the old version — it's time for a change," and claimed at the time that version 2.0 would achieve a cold start 5 times faster than the old version, without mentioning AI at all. Even earlier, in February (2月), then-store vice president Steve Allison openly admitted the launcher was "terrible": every page switch required sending a request to the backend to reload, and any dip in network speed meant waiting several seconds, with the experience left far behind by competitors. He revealed that since the end of last year the internal architecture had been "torn down and rebuilt," with a success criterion set — waiting for players to exclaim "oh my god, this thing is finally not so terrible anymore." Now AI has turned that complaint into reality, except what is "too hard" is no longer the launcher, but the portion of the programming work that Epic handed over.