The big Epic Games Store rebuild teased earlier this year has arrived as a new "preview" client available to download for Windows and Mac, as well as Linux for the first time.
PC Gamer was shown a demonstration of the client in advance of the announcement, and the speed improvement appeared significant. Epic claims that it's halved the launcher's startup time, and that it now goes from a cold start to the store page 46% faster than Steam. (Epic says its technical improvements have been verified by an external vendor. We have yet to test the client ourselves.)
There are also updates to the interface: A redesigned library view is the standout change, and it includes the option to bring in shortcuts to games installed with Steam and other clients.
In a blog post, Epic notably refers to the new client as "vibe coded," a term for prompting AI tools to produce code. The term be taken as either derogatory or endearing depending on who's talking.
Epic goes for laughs, saying that it opted to use AI because "programming is hard," but the company isn't joking about its use of AI coding tools. On a call this week with Epic Games Store GM Martin Keely, who took over for the outgoing Steve Allison in August, I asked whether AI was used primarily to analyze the existing EGS code for opportunities to improve it, or to write new code. He affirmed it was the latter.
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