Steam Client is now faster than Epic's new vibe coded launcher

Perhaps it will bring back native apps because supporting other platforms is less laborious.

I've had reasonably good luck having Claude generate Rust code that performs well.

Are you on the beta branch? It doesn't look like its in stable yet (Settings --> Interface --> Client Beta Participation)

Epic, EA, etc then made their own similar launchers. Of course all of them also want to launch when Windows boots, update constantly, and not close when you press close.

Prioritization still matters. Agents will happily optimize your app for performance, but at least current ones seem like you need to explicitly tell them.

Your "dark forest" analogy sounds reasonable but Epic's outright admission of "vibe coding" is a bit of a footgun considering how rabidly anti-AI the folks on sites like Reddit are. If they had just been like, "it's faster and supports Linux" they would be the darling of the internet.

The dark forest hypothesis is that we can't find any alien life because it's dangerous to broadcast your existence and location to competitors. So rational thing for every alien civilian to do (and arguably for us) is to keep quiet.

But what does it mean in this context?

I don't see why not. They clearly know what they are doing at Valve, and for an engineer who knows what he's doing, LLMs are of very limited use.

This is probably the saddest comment I've read on HN. It really shows the state of this place and how far into psychosis the comments have fallen.

Anyway, what are useful features of Steam:

- their dedication to getting Windows games running on Linux (to see off the existential threat Microsoft poses to them, but nonetheless greatly appreciated)

- community forums / screenshots / artwork / guides etc. for every product. Very useful if the game vendor doesn't have its own, and most game vendors don't

- that Steam Sales encourage vendors to offer games at much more reasonable prices (e.g. a few pounds/dollars/etc.) for what is effectively a license, revocable at any time, not a real purchase. £60? Ha ha fuck off, I'm waiting for the sale when it's £5

- also, as far as I've seen, every game distributed can still be downloaded today. People may complain that publishers update a title e.g. to remove licensed music 10 years later... but you can still download the old version with some trickery. And I've never seen Steam actively remove downloads for existing customers, I've only seen games removed from the store so no future customers

- pirates have found that most games, if their only DRM is Steamworks, are incredibly easy to crack. I am very glad Steam has convinced most publishers to use that alone and nothing worse, and I curse publishers who insist on their own DRM, their own launcher, etc. If Valve goes tits-up, I have a lot of confidence most of peoples libraries will still be playable with a little bit of cracking.

There are other useful features, even if Valve is getting rich and fat off selling gambling and day-trading to teenagers.

Rocket league used to have a Linux build, then epic decided to kill that off entirely.

I recently bought the steam frame. It's years past when I would have wanted this VR headset the most, but half the reason I bought it was to support Valve's R&D with Linux desktop support, arm JIT translation, etc.

People bitch and moan about "voting with your wallet", then you have a company that tons of people continually vote with their wallet for, then people complain about others defending the one company that doesn't seem to want to screw their userbase over.

Sure Steam has some blind spots for the very sweaty semi-pro gamer. I don't care about virtual stickers and little treats. I care that all my games run on my Linux desktop after years of devs not giving a shit and other companies being openly hostile.

Valves competitors suck. Their VR competitor is Meta which in a just world would not exist as an organization. Their gaming marketplace competitor is Epic, which produces the character-slop extraction shooter and a launcher that gets more annoying to use every time I open it.

The other "competitors" if you can even call them that, are microsoft who has basically deleted a dozen game studios in the last year via moneyball, and other game companies like EA and Ubisoft who routinely delete purchased games and tell the users to go suck it.

Valve is basically the only company out there who is resisting the constant urge to make everything shitty to increase investor profits. They stay private and everyone loves what they do with that power. I'm sure a ton of fail-son PE bros are dying for the chance to buy out valve and turn everything it's ever done to absolute dogshit. We'd be getting half-life 3, 4, 5, 6, mobile, etc and they'd all be shit.

Bonus points, this is the text from the post.

> How out of touch can you be as a company, this is embarrassing

BTW Gaben is my friend and I identify as Dr Gordon Freeman.

/s

Parasocial relationships are a byproduct of the technology you (I assume) and I have and continue to create & roll-out to society, increasing physical distance from actual humans as well as increasing "in the head, only" identity, or identities, that culture carries with itself more and more.

Everything you don’t like, you can avoid.

Yup.

So, here's my relevant example of how "vibe coding" doesn't mean "not caring", an isochrone map generator, real time, about the same total download (in a private window) as Google maps is when looking at Berlin:

https://benwheatley.github.io/Isochrone/web/?region=berlin&n...

It almost certainly still has bugs. And the code itself is probably terrible, because LLMs don't always clean up when you tell them to remove everything related to a bug.

But it is a download that's 90% data, and does get you a real-time updates as you drag your origin around the largest city in the EU.

Put it in the loop and you have software Lauch before OS finish booting up

Things nobody has said since like 2005? A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal. Especially when everyone just leaves it running anyway. There's far more significant aspects like memory usage, game library, and general features.

I’m curious what issues you have run into that you consider it terrible?

But for the Steam Frame, which is probably booting while it is strapped to your face and completely obscuring your vision, every second is felt much more intensely. Anything that can be done to get to first interaction sooner has a much, much larger effect on the feel of the experience.

The speed would always have been nice to have, but it moves beyond "nice to have" for the Steam Frame case into having a significant effect on how it feels to use and the out-of-box experience. Yes, you'll use sleep most of the time, but when you do a full boot or reboot, you feel the seconds.

It's bad, but I wouldn't call it terrible.

It does have unresolved annoyances, like how context menus randomly stop working on Linux, and tweaking that setting (whose name I forget) on/off does little to fix them. You have to resort to using Big Picture mode, which is annoying. If they ever fix this, I'd have zero problems with the Steam client.

Mostly though I don't care about the client, I care about the games and they work seamlessly in Linux!

If you need to tell people you're better than someone, you probably aren't.

It felt like a message to investors rather than users.

(measured this on the old laptop I use to play the just-released Order of the sinking star)

(the 420 ms to _restore from the tray_ is even crazier -- I remember Firefox used to do warm starts in ~800 ms 20 years ago)

do you really care if it's working and it's reliable? (i.e. not an overfit to the current data)

Or you can download 66MB of data on a 100mbit/s internet connection in 5 seconds.

Say you need to load 1gb from disk and need to download 1MB of data from internet. It should take ~75 milliseconds to do that.

It is incredibly slow, considering Valve is a billion dollar company. This level of optimization is closer to what you would expect from a person who is programming as a hobby.

Again, one may argue how useful all of this is, but it is there, and most users likely have the app on a OS startup anyway.

That's likely really useful against bit rot / corruption due to unstable overclock (XMP / EXPO profiles come with no guarantee of stability).

This article is completely worthless and contains zero useful information, no conclusions about anything can be derived from it.

From my own testing the Epic launcher is still significantly faster than steam at launch, but I do not know if I have gotten the update or if its on a beta branch.

Presumably people here understand how software profiling or whatever works, why can no one here see how obviously nonsensical the reporting here is.

Like when they made two generations of XBox consoles boot 5 seconds faster by making the unskippable boot animation 5 seconds shorter. Many years after the exact same issue bottlenecked Windows 7 boot times on SSDs.

You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though. It's just how they work, you need to keep track of play time and respond to any API calls from the game. But it could be a native background daemon instead of two Steam Web Helpers.

borderline murderous eyetwitch

This feels like a strange argument given site we are on. "Why are applications so slow and bloated these days" has been a pretty constant complaint around here for many, many years.

How are you twisting more efficient software into a bad thing?