If we did one of our weekly polls on which game platform/store is your favourite, I would be very surprised if anything other than a miniscule minority of readers selected the Epic Games Store. I barely ever use the thing and even I know it’s not the most enjoyable experience. But there’s a chance that might not be the case for much longer, as apparently there’s a big update coming.
Judging by to Pirat_Nations’s Unreal Fest slides on X, Epic is cooking up a complete redesign for its Launcher, and the big claims are that the “ground-up rebuild’ will lead to a “5x faster cold start (average)” and “6.5x faster systray restore to library (average).” In other words, much quicker to boot up, either from the system tray or cold.
Hopefully—hopefully—that will mean the app itself is less laggy, too.
I thankfully have a small enough library on the platform that the lag isn’t too bad, but I’ve heard some real terror tales from colleagues with bigger libraries. Our Jacob (different Jacob) wrote about the phenomena back in 2023 when comparing to the much improved Heroic Launcher.
I have no reason to doubt him, either, given the general difficulty I have using the app. For example, launching games on-press rather than displaying more info, and popping up a separate window for downloads.
Other changes shown on the slides include:
- Personalised game recommendations on the home page
- Quick-access categories for easier single-page browsing
- Product detail pages tailored to each player, “connecting players to the game’s community, story, and their own progression”
- Patch notes on the game’s storefront
According to Pirat_Nation, there will also be written player reviews, player profiles with avatars, support for Xbox and PlayStation controllers, cross-region game gifting, publisher-funded coupons, and a tool to check how games will run on your system.
A lot of this of course sounds very similar to how Valve does things on Steam, and that’s not a bad thing in my books. For one, most PC gamers use Steam and it’s what they’re used to. And second, well, it’s just a better design. If you click a game page, for instance, you want to be able to access anything relevant to that game, whether it’s patch notes, reviews, or whatever else.
Let’s just hope the new rebuild lands before too long and follows through on what its promises. I’ll be particularly keen to see how actual in-app navigation feels in terms of snappiness. Launchers are tools after all, not products in themselves—they should keep out of the way as much as possible.
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