Epic's vibe-coded Launcher claims a 46% faster cold start than Steam, on Epic's own test

Epic opened a Preview build of its rebuilt Epic Games Launcher on October 14 with an unusually candid line: "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." The comparison that followed, a 46 percent faster cold start than Steam, was commissioned by Epic.

Where the 46 percent comes from

Epic's figures, as TechPowerUp relays them, put the new Launcher's cold start at 5.47 seconds against Steam's 10.07, which the company bills as 46 percent faster, or 1.8x. Epic also claims the store opens 3x faster, that the library loads 30x faster, and that returning from the system tray to the Library screen takes 0.36 seconds against Steam's 0.42, a 14 percent edge. Those numbers come from testing Epic commissioned and Keywords Studios ran this month: an average of five runs on each of 13 machines, three lowest-end machines excluded.

Users with stopwatches get different numbers

Ars Technica's own testing found the Launcher reaches the store page from a cold start "a few seconds faster than Steam," and called Epic's 0.06-second tray advantage "so small as to be unnoticeable." On Hacker News, a commenter posted their own readings: "I tested it right now and Steam takes about 2 seconds to restore from tray and 10-15 for cold boot. The new Epic launcher is around 0.5 and 5." That is a wider gap in Epic's favour than Epic claimed, and a Steam tray restore five times slower than the 0.42 seconds Epic measured. Within a day Valve shipped a Steam client update that cut its startup to 5.23 seconds, per a video posted to X and reported by Wccftech. The disagreement is less about the numbers than about which of four things counts as "faster": cold boot, tray restore, storefront render, or library load.

What a rerun would need to publish

"Vibe coded" is Epic's own description of how the Launcher was built, not an audit of the result. Store general manager Martin Keely told PC Gamer the team started from scratch and used AI as "a tool to write and review new features and new capabilities from the ground up in a different tech stack," and Epic says it let a small team rewrite the code base faster. Whether models wrote the code and whether the launcher is fast are separate claims; only the second is disputed. The AI-first pivot behind this build is still a promise, and this Preview is its first shipped artifact. What would settle the numbers is not another chart but a published method: the hardware, both clients' build versions, the run count, and the raw timings, enough for a third party to rerun.