Games Store Launcher Built With AI Enters Preview, Boots 46% Faster Than Steam

Epic Games has put a rebuilt Epic Games Launcher into preview for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The announcement leans hard into the fact that the code was written by AI. The first line of the launch post reads, “Programming is hard. So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher that’s way faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look.”

The preview builds arrive the same week that Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said on X that the company is “moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration.” Bloomberg separately reported that an Epic director on an unannounced Disney title told staff there would be “no more hand-written code” on that project, a story that lines up with our earlier piece on the Disney extraction shooter’s reported delay (#900) and the related Star Wars / Marvel crossover shooter delay (#660).

Epic Games Store VP and GM Martin Keely told The Verge, IGN, and others in briefings that the launcher team has been working on the rewrite for most of 2026. He said the team used AI to replicate the existing launcher’s core functionality, with humans supervising the process. Keely added that the team’s approach predates Sweeney’s “maximum AI acceleration” memo, but said the launcher is “on the same train” as the wider AI push.

The new client claims a 5.47-second cold-start boot, which Epic says is 46% faster than Steam, plus a 14% faster restore from system tray to library. The first preview is “light on features” in Epic’s own framing, with the team calling it “a speedboat and not a yacht” and noting it includes shopping cart support as “advanced digital commerce technology.” Other additions are voice chat, more detail on library games, customizable library views, faster filtering, and richer download speed data. The current launcher stays live while Epic rolls the preview out.

Alongside the client, Epic confirmed a Linux version of the launcher is coming and that Fortnite will follow it to Linux through the new app, working with Easy Anti-Cheat. Siliconera noted the announcement did not include details on what safety or security reviews the vibe-coded client went through before users would hand over payment info. Vibe coding is/are the practice of using AI to generate code from natural-language prompts without necessarily understanding the resulting program; critics flag the security and maintainability risks, which is why a payments-facing launcher is a more loaded test case than a typical internal tool.

Our read: This is the moment the AI-coding debate stops being abstract for PC players. Epic is not using vibe coding to ship a small internal tool; the same client is the storefront you type your credit card into and the on-ramp for Fortnite on Linux, which has been the most-requested PC gaming move of the year (#958). For context, the original Epic Games Store launcher launched in December 2018 to complaints about its size, slowness, and missing features; seven years of hand-written patches did not get Epic parity with Steam on the basics. Now Epic says AI did the rewrite in a small-team sprint, and is shipping a Linux client and a faster store on the same day. The pattern matters more than the speed claim: if a vibe-coded payments client passes a real security review, every other store app on PC is on the clock. If it does not, the security questions land on Martin Keely’s launcher team first, with Sweeney’s “maximum AI acceleration” memo already on the record as the policy that pushed them there.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report