Epic says its new vibe-coded Epic Games Launcher is faster than Steam

arstechnica.com

2 points·PaulHoule··4 comments

> Epic writes that “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.”

Yikes. These game storefronts are not exactly rocket science, they are like primitive e-commerce sites. IIRC it took Apple and Google less than a year to slap their app stores together and I would certainly expect Epic to have spent very little time on theirs originally.

But I think whatever Epic does is futile anyway, even if they hired the best of HN and hand-crafted a feature-rich masterpiece of a storefront the simple lack of interoperable multiplayer, mods and DLC would still be a massive disadvantage.

Storefronts run into problems because of bad ideas and bad incentives. The temptation is always to eat the seedcorn by annoying users for imagined short term gain -- but then users are driven away and the gain never comes. I can say that "just works" polish is a major plus for a storefront and that I've never once complained that the Steam launcher takes too long to load on my gaming PC, my mac, or my Deck.

Remarkably Steam has been successful as it is because Gabe Newell is the king and isn't accountable to shareholders and bean counters, much as Elon has been successful at developing reusable space flight. (Of course, there are counterexamples such as Mark Zuckerberg who keeps running Facebook into the ground but maybe there's a reason there is always a frown on his face.)

Some earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50088511

weird flex to boast about launch times for something that runs in the background the entire time on top of saying you used AI to build it.

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