Epic Games wants you to know its new store launcher was written by a machine, and it's proud of that.
On Wednesday, the Epic Games Store team put out a blog post announcing a preview build of a redesigned launcher, the app that handles your library, storefront and social features on the Epic Games Store. The pitch, in Epic's own words: "Programming is hard. So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher that's way faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look."
Vibe coding, if you haven't run into the term, describes writing software by prompting an AI model rather than typing out the logic by hand, often without the programmer fully understanding what the generated code is doing. Software engineers have warned for a couple of years now that the practice makes codebases harder to maintain and can quietly introduce security holes. Epic is building a storefront that handles people's payment details on top of it.
The company isn't shy about the tradeoff. "Is this bad boy faster? Yes. Will it have some bugs? Yes. Do we want to hear about them? Hell yes," Epic posted on X, telling testers to use the in-app feedback button once they find something broken. In its blog post, Epic described the release as "light on features" and framed it as "a speedboat and not a yacht," though it says the build already includes a working shopping cart, voice chat, customizable library views and faster download filtering.
The numbers Epic is leading with are specific. It says the new launcher boots in 5.47 seconds on a cold start, 46% faster than Steam by its own comparison, and that restoring the app from the system tray back to the library is 14% quicker than Valve's client. Those figures come from Epic's own blog, not from any independent benchmark.
This isn't an isolated experiment. EGS vice president Martin Keely told IGN that AI usage is now "an issue that's of high visibility" across the industry, but argued it "made us more efficient and allowed a small team to rewrite the code base and be able to launch it faster across platforms." A day earlier, Bloomberg reported that Epic is pushing an "AI first" pipeline internally, starting with a previously delayed Marvel and Star Wars shooter, where developers were allegedly told no more hand-written code should go into the project and that art should come from "full AI workflows," according to Bloomberg's sourcing.
CEO Tim Sweeney has been framing the shift publicly, too, writing online that Epic is moving toward "maximum AI acceleration" across teams, including those building Unreal Engine, the toolkit behind games like Gears of War: E-Day and Final Fantasy 7 Revelation.
Whether speed claims translate into something players actually want is the open question. Epic has spent years failing to pull a majority of PC gamers off Steam despite exclusivity deals and store credit promotions. The preview build is downloadable now, with Epic actively soliciting bug reports before any wider rollout.
GDFiled by The Games Desk
Consoles, handhelds, PC gaming and the platforms and hardware behind them.
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