The big Epic Games Store rebuild teased earlier this year has arrived as a new “preview” client available to download for Windows and Mac, as well as Linux for the first time.
PC Gamer was shown a demonstration of the client in advance of the announcement, and the speed improvement appeared significant. Epic claims that it’s halved the launcher’s startup time, and that it now goes from a cold start to the store page 46% faster than Steam. (Epic says its technical improvements have been verified by an external vendor. We have yet to test the client ourselves.)
There are also updates to the interface: A redesigned library view is the standout change, and it includes the option to bring in shortcuts to games installed with Steam and other clients.
In a blog post, Epic refers to the new client as “vibe coded,” a term for prompting AI tools to produce code. The term be taken as either derogatory or endearing depending on who’s talking.
Epic goes for laughs, saying that it opted to use AI because “programming is hard,” but the company isn’t joking about its use of AI coding tools. On a call this week with Epic Games Store GM Martin Keely, who took over for the outgoing Steve Allison in August, I asked whether AI was used primarily to analyze the existing EGS code for opportunities to improve it, or to write new code. He affirmed it was the latter.
“We started from scratch,” said Keely. “This is a completely new architecture for both the store and the launcher shell. So we did look at functionality that existed and said we want to replicate that, but not the code itself. So [AI] was a tool to write and review new features and new capabilities from the ground up in a different tech stack than what we had previously.”
You’d be hard pressed to find any big games company that isn’t mucking about with AI, but Epic is particularly bullish on the tech, and willing to confront public disapproval. On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Epic instructed the team working on an unannounced Star Wars and Marvel shooter to take an “AI first” approach to development.
“We have a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration,” Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said after that news was reported. “The aim isn’t to do the same stuff with fewer people, but to enable everyone here to build MORE and BETTER stuff, and to bring the benefits to all teams using Unreal.”
The use of “vibe coded” to describe this new client, which is sure to draw some eyerolls, seems to me like a clear statement from Epic that it is unbothered by AI critics.
For now, the release of the new client is not being communicated through the existing Epic Games Store software. Epic is treating it like a beta test, expecting gradual adoption through word-of-mouth while it addresses feedback.
The preview client can be downloaded at launcher.epicgames.com, and alongside the expected Windows and macOS versions, there’s also a Linux build.
In conjunction with that news, Epic announced that it’s working on upgrading Easy Anti-Cheat so that it can bring Fortnite to Linux and help other multiplayer games make the jump.