"Library loads 30x faster" - Epic Games' new, much faster launcher has arrived

Epic Games' new launcher is now available to download in preview and promises to load faster than the old version and Steam.

Epic has released a new version of the Epic Games Launcher, making a preview version of the company's updated Steam competitor available for download now.

Built using artificial intelligence and "vibe coding," Epic Games' new launcher is currently in the early stages of development, and according to a new blog post from Epic, so are the features. The preview version has the main components you'd expect from a launcher, including the store, library, and social panels, as well as the unreal-focused developer page.

"It's been completely rebuilt from the ground up," Martin Keely, Epic Games' VP and General Manager of the Store, explained in an interview with IGN. So it's a whole new technology stack, a whole new rewrite of the shell, which has a download manager, library, and the app itself, as well as a new store architecture. So features like discovery pages and product details have all been rewritten.

In terms of improvements, for this first phase of the rebuild the main focus has been on speed. Epic says the launcher boots from cold mode in 5.47 seconds, which it claims is 46% faster than Steam. When reopening the app from the system tray, it takes just 0.36 seconds - 14% faster than Steam. These times will of course vary depending on your system's specs, but under ideal conditions the new app will seem to be much faster than its predecessor.

"The library loads 30 times faster [than the previous launcher]," Keely said. “Startup is twice as fast and it's a small footprint, just 300MB. "That was another thing we wanted to minimize as much as possible to support the hardware that players have."

For this new version of the launcher, Epic supports Windows, MacOS and for the first time Linux. This also means that Fortnite is coming to Linux, although it's not fully available yet - Epic needs to revamp its Easy Anti-Cheat system for the platform first. "We're bringing Fortnite to Linux via the Epic Games Launcher when it works with a large number of distribution maintainers," explained Epic's blog post.

Beyond speed and platform upgrades, the new launcher has some much-needed quality-of-life improvements, such as better customization – the new top bar can be set to show tabs in priority order, and the library can be filtered using different categories.

As for what future updates will bring, Keely revealed that “another part we're going to be working on is how to improve game discovery in a way that's relevant to every player. "We have a fairly large library and sometimes there are great games that are relevant to someone, so making sure we continue to improve the business component of how we make gaming more feasible and more social so people can recommend games to each other and make it easier to share."

Epic previously detailed its plans for a new launcher earlier this year, saying its efforts would result in five times faster boot times. Of course, while speed is an issue, it may take longer to convince players – some believe that the Epic Games Store will never be as good as Steam.

Matt Presslow is IGN's executive features editor.