Epic Games' new vibe-coded launcher is 46% faster than Steam

I’m not really sure why this is surprising at all. Isn’t steam based on web tech? If anything I think the comparison should be on features and experience. I don’t think it’s that hard to make something launch faster than steam. I do think it’s hard to make a better experience than steam.

Epic is just setting up for the same rug-pull as every other tech company: get you entrenched, and then turn the screws. I don't care what they give away for free or what improvements they make.

> The results reported that Epic's client is 46% faster than Valve's client during cold starts, clocking in at 5.47 seconds compared to Steam taking 10.07 seconds. When you restore both apps from system tray background states, the new client takes 0.36 seconds while Steam takes 0.42 seconds, according to the report.

> There are still missing features that the legacy client currently has, like comprehensive social panels and advanced account management options, with its developers "working toward feature parity."

Seems fairly likely it'll get slower as they add all the missing features. I'm not sure a couple of seconds startup time will be relevant to users.

The steam client has always been a bit clunky, that's not the issue. They don't seem to be able to understand that.

Oh boy! A whole .06 seconds?! I can't wait to abandon the last company in the industry that atleast tries to pretend they care about the consumer, for .06 seconds faster launch!

Would love for someone to pentest the launcher. Every company being this AI-pilled is really just asking for it when they brag about their vibe-coded products.

I'm personally more interested in how quickly it uninstalls.

It's clear that Epic keeps track of the consumer and industry pulse by shooting themselves on the foot and tracking litters of blood lost per minute.

The clown in charge of that launcher has cost Sweeney a billion$ easy.

And I'm sure it still sucks compared to Steam.

Human made launchers work great

And it does 1/10 of it.

(I yoinked this comment of mine from a different article)

Them unironically bragging about vibecoding this is just hilariously embarrassing, even for Sweeney Todd and his usual shenanigans. How much money has this man spent trying to bribe people into using his shitty platform with free games, and people would still rather spend money on their competitors? How garbage of a platform it must be if you can't even bribe people into using it!

Ignoring that they're bragging about first boot times of all things (for an application that you launch once when your computer starts and then never close subsequently), I just did a rough little benchmark to time steam launching on Pop_OS and becoming interactable since I was curious. I quit after 20 runs cause I got bored since the numbers are pretty stable, but here are the numbers on my machine (9800x3D, 64GB DDR5, 4080S): https://pastebin.com/0uWXyaLb. Not a perfect benchmark, I'm hitting a warm cache yada yada, but good enough I'd wager, and subjectively just timing it myself and clicking into my library or the store takes about what the results in that pastebin show. I even rebooted my machine twice and timed it from a cold boot to interactivity in Steam, and the results were roughly the same.

Now I would've tested the EGS launcher as well to compare, but going to https://store.epicgames.com/download?lang=en-US I don't see a download button on either Firefox & Chrome on Linux [1]. In fact, they seem to think I'm on a mobile device or something, because they keep referencing Android and iOS in all the FAQ items. I suppose they didn't get around to vibecoding a user agent sniffer there yet, as we all know adding a download button is almost as difficult to do as adding a shopping cart feature to your webstore - which for the uninitiated took them 3 years to do.

And yet Sweeney Todd expects me to put in my credit card details into his self-admittedly vibeslopped web store? With the garbage/non-existant support that they have? No thanks Todd, I think I'll keep spending my money on Steam, thank you very much.

[1] - https://ibb.co/RGRjkMws

EDIT: I just found the download link tucked away after doing a lot of digging, and it can't even load their own fucking store page from within the launcher [2]. It completely freezes and glitches out on the launcher page.

[2] - https://files.catbox.moe/16e1lb.mkv (be warned that it's a .mkv file I just recorded that will be directly downloaded when you click the link cause catbox is convenient).