Epic Games says the preview build of its rebuilt game-store launcher, released October 14, goes from a cold start to a visible store page in 5.47 seconds, against Steam’s 10.07 seconds: a 4.6-second, 46% difference, using numbers Hot Hardware reported and which PC Gamer says were checked by an outside vendor Epic hasn’t named. Restoring the client from the system tray takes 0.36 seconds against Steam’s 0.42: 14% faster, a six-hundredth-of-a-second gap that Ars Technica’s own testing found “so small as to be unnoticeable.” Epic built the new client by prompting AI tools to write the code instead of writing it by hand, and says so without apology.
“Programming is hard,” Epic’s release post reads. “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.” The term traces to a February 2025 post by Andrej Karpathy, the former Tesla AI director and OpenAI co-founder, who described a style of coding where you “fully give in to the vibes... and forget that the code even exists” — a mode he was explicit was for weekend projects, where he accepted every AI-generated change without reading it, not for production systems; Collins Dictionary named the term 2025’s word of the year in November. Epic Games Store VP Martin Keely told IGN a narrower version applied to the launcher itself, limited to “code efficiency and the architecture,” with the app’s look still handled by Epic’s regular design group. He told PC Gamer the team “started from scratch,” building “a completely new architecture for both the store and the launcher shell” in a different tech stack, replicating the old launcher’s functionality without carrying over its code.
The old client’s problem was structural, not cosmetic. The Epic Games Launcher had run on Unreal Engine, Epic’s own game engine, as its application runtime since launch, a choice widely blamed for slow cold starts, high idle memory use and sluggish store pages. The rewrite drops Unreal Engine as the launcher’s runtime entirely and ships, for the first time, a native Linux build alongside Windows and macOS. Epic paired the release with work on Easy Anti-Cheat meant to eventually bring Fortnite and other multiplayer titles to Linux too.
How much faster “faster” is depends on which Epic claim is being read and what it was measured against. At Unreal Fest in June, under the name Launcher V2, Epic previewed the same rebuild and claimed 5x faster average cold starts and 6.5x faster average systray restores, numbers PC Gamer reported were measured on a 32-core AMD Threadripper workstation with 128GB of RAM and a professional-grade RTX A6000 GPU, benchmarked against the old Unreal-Engine launcher, not against Steam. October’s benchmark against Steam, on whatever hardware the unnamed vendor used, works out to a 1.84x cold-start speedup and a 1.17x restore speedup: real, but a fraction of June’s numbers, because June wasn’t measuring the same comparison. Epic Games Store VP Martin Keely gave reporters a third baseline, telling IGN the library now “loads 30 times faster” — again against the old launcher, not Steam, with no stated unit for what counts as a load.
One number attached to the rebuild in several aggregator write-ups, that it cost Epic $400 million in engineering spend, doesn’t hold up. The $400 million is from Epic’s own 2025 Year in Review: it’s third-party game spending on the Epic Games Store for the year, up 57%, a revenue figure with no stated connection to the launcher’s budget. The same report puts the store’s monthly active users at 78 million in December 2025, an all-time high, against 317 million-plus total registered PC accounts — about one in four accounts active in a given month. Valve doesn’t publish an equivalent monthly-active-user figure for Steam, so there’s no official number to measure Epic’s against.
Epic describes the preview as “light on features,” telling users to “think of it as a speedboat and not a yacht.” Its release notes initially told developers and competitive players to keep using the old launcher for now, an odd caveat for a client meant to show that AI-written code can stand in for hand-written code, before Epic deleted the line. Communications manager Brian Sharon then issued a clarification: “To be clear: once you’re in a game you’re good to go. The same goes for developer tools and non-gaming applications. All of the services will work as intended, and there’s nothing that would prevent casual or competitive play.”
The mandate reaches past the launcher
Bloomberg reported on October 12 that Epic delayed an unannounced Marvel-and-Star-Wars extraction shooter built with Disney, previously planned for March 2027, after the project fell behind schedule, and told the development team to switch to an “AI first” production model. One of the game’s directors told staff on a video call, according to Bloomberg’s sources, “No more hand-written code,” adding that the game’s art would be “generated with full AI workflows” using tools that include Anthropic’s Claude, with staff overseeing the output. Staff were reportedly “stunned.” CEO Tim Sweeney responded on social media after the report:
We have a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration. 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.
Reaction to the launcher split along predictable lines online. Kotaku’s headline borrowed a viral reply calling the result “vibeslopped.” The objection that recurred in that backlash wasn’t really about speed. It was that a client holding millions of saved credit-card numbers is an unusual place to apply a technique its own coiner described as deliberately skipping the parts of engineering that don’t show up when you just prompt for a result: security review, failure handling, correctness checks. A similar pattern showed up in a separate attempt to rebuild production creative software with AI agents: the parts that demo well are rarely the parts that are hard to ship.
Epic hasn’t disclosed which AI models wrote the launcher, who ran the October benchmark, or what hardware it ran on. The preview sits alongside the old launcher rather than replacing it, opt-in for now. The harder test is still ahead: whether code that a model wrote and a small team reviewed holds up once millions of logins, purchases and crash reports hit it, rather than one vendor’s single benchmark run.