Epic Launcher Outpaces Steam on the Day Valve Speeds Up—So I Tested Both

It's only a few seconds, mind you.

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Glancing at my screen is often a stressful experience for my colleagues. Besides the desktop icons and all the browser tabs I have open at any given time, you wouldn't want to know how many things I set up to boot. In between, of course, are the Steam Store and Epic Games customers, and let me tell you, not all launchers are created equal.

Earlier this week, Epic shared on X that it "coded Epic Games' vape launcher faster than anyone else." On the same day, Valve released a Steam Client update that "improved the launch performance of the Steam Client". Well, there's only one thing for it: I have to put these bad boys to the test to determine once and for all whose thrower is really faster.

For my initial benchmarks, I timed how fast each customer loaded into their respective storefronts (with all images properly displayed) after opening them from the system tray (for those curious, my rig is an iBuyPower built with an RTX 4070 Super). I did three tests on each and then averaged the results. The Steam client loaded in an average of 9.32 seconds, while the Epic Games Launcher took 5.98 seconds for me.

Others have shown the library launching Steam in less time, but the Epic launcher is seconds faster as far as my rig is concerned. That being said, Steam is my client of choice.

For example, the first thing I noticed during my testing was that we don't simply exit the Epic Games launcher like we do with Steam. In the Valve client, click "Steam" in the top left corner, then simply select "Exit" from the drop-down menu. A quick check of Task Manager shows that it's not running stealthily in the background.

It's not that simple for Epic. You can click the "x" or right-click the icon in your system tray and then select "Close window". But for my benchmarks, I chose Epic Launcher to "end task" every time, because just closing the window doesn't stop it from running in the background. In each of my tests, I had to do this twice because the launcher opened itself after I finished the first time.

Aside from this very specific small gripe, there are other features in Steam that I personally appreciate. The recent Big Art update has really beefed up my game library, and I've been making liberal use of the "personal calendar" feature (Steam has already teased a number of upcoming cozy and scary games, much to my wallet's chagrin).

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As we saw from my benchmarks, the Steam client is by no means perfect. For example, Valve keeps saying that it has ironed out quirks about porting local games, though the experience can still be pretty weird. I'm also not really a fan of the passionate logo screensaver. And to be fair, even the features I like probably make the customer's store page look a bit cluttered. However, I generally prefer that mess to the austere look of the Epic Games Launcher.

3. Best handheld gaming PC: Asus ROG Xbox Ally X

4. Best mini computer: Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT

Jess has been writing about games for over ten years, with a significant portion of that time spent working on PLAY print publications and PlayStation Official Magazine. When he's not checking out all things hardware here, he's either making an impassioned defense of a 7/10 game, daydreaming about his first novel, or envying the last time he got chased around a field with a giant foam sword.

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