Epic says its new vibe-coded Epic Games Launcher is faster than Steam
Ars Technica Kyle Orland
Epic built a new Games Launcher with AI and says it’s faster than the old one. It’s a fresh start for its Steam rival, and it’s coming to Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Based on reporting by Ars Technica, Kyle Orland — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Nearly eight years after Epic launched its own store and launcher to go after Steam, the company is trying a new tactic: vibe coding. The Fortnite maker has put out a public preview of its Epic Games Launcher, and Epic says the new build is “way faster and more responsive” than the current version, with a new look too.
The pitch sounds cheeky, but the company says there’s a real engineering story behind it. Epic Games Store general manager and VP Martin Keely told PC Gamer that the team “started from scratch” and used AI to help write and review new features and capabilities in a different tech stack from the one it used before. The idea was not to copy the old code base, but to reproduce the functionality without dragging the same code along with it.
Keely also told IGN that this approach made the team more efficient. He said a small group was able to rewrite the code base and get the launcher out faster across platforms, with support for Windows and Mac, plus a Linux version on the way.
So Epic is not just polishing the launcher. It is rebuilding it, and betting that AI-assisted development can help it move faster than the old guard. That is a neat move for a company still trying to make its store feel less like an obligation and more like a reason to log in.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is classic platform-company behavior: when the old thing gets clunky, rebuild it and call the new stack a virtue. The bigger tell is that Epic is happy to make “vibe coding” part of the pitch, which says as much about the industry’s current AI fetish as it does about software engineering. If the launcher ends up genuinely better, users won’t care how romantic the process was; they’ll just stop waiting for it to open.
Read more about this at: Ars Technica
