Nearly eight years after Epic took on Steam with its personal Sport Retailer and launcher, the Fortnite maker is deploying a brand new device to present it an edge over Valve: vibe coding.
In announcing the brand new publicly available “Preview” build of its Epic Video games Launcher, Epic writes that “programming is tough. So, as an alternative of doing that, we vibe coded a brand new Epic Video games Launcher that’s method sooner and extra responsive than the present one, and has a brand new look.” And whereas that may sound slightly tongue-in-cheek, Epic Video games Retailer Basic Supervisor and VP Martin Keely told PC Gamer that the workforce “began from scratch” and used AI as “a device to jot down and overview new options and new capabilities from the bottom up in a special tech stack than what we had beforehand.” The aim, Keely mentioned, was to “take a look at performance that existed [in the current Epic Games Launcher] and [say] we wish to replicate that, however not the code itself.”
Speaking to IGN, Keely clarified that utilizing AI to code the brand new Launcher “made us extra environment friendly and allowed a small workforce to rewrite the code base and be capable to launch it sooner throughout platforms, help Home windows and Mac, and we’re going to have a Linux model as properly.”
We vibe coded the Epic Video games Launcher to be sooner than the opposite man.
Don’t consider us? Check it out for your self in Preview:
https://t.co/pdtAeEIri4 https://t.co/aMxojUUVPV— Epic Video games Retailer (@EpicGames) October 14, 2026
The deal with startup velocity extends to Epic’s social media announcement, which as soon as once more stresses that “we vibe coded the Epic Video games Launcher to be sooner than the opposite man.” Ars’s personal testing confirms that the brand new Launcher goes from a chilly begin to the shop web page a couple of seconds sooner than Steam (assuming no login or replace points get in the best way). Epic additionally claims the brand new Launcher can restore from the system tray to the Library display barely sooner than Steam, although the claimed distinction of 0.06 seconds on this appears so small as to be unnoticeable (and was in our testing).