Steam Client is now faster than Epic's new vibe coded launcher

goatking

Thank you Epic for improving Steam! Appreciated

jonathanlydall

> Your country is not allowed to access this resource What’s the issue they have with South Africa?

josefresco

Nobody asked for this! We just want more, better and cheaper games! That's it. I could care less how quick it takes to launch an app which then stays open for hours/days.

Hamuko

Epic Games seems desperate in its attempts to make gamers like AI.

kakuri

Ok but why didn't they do it sooner? The Steam client is terrible and there is no excuse for it.

tancop

I used to think vibe coding would get us slow Electron apps but now we got speed wars between game launchers. I hope this comes for all types of software. With that said, I tested it right now and Steam takes about 2 seconds to restore from tray and 10-15 for cold boot. The new Epic launcher is around 0.5 and 5 like the article mentioned. Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something.

zug_zug

Great. Now make it not need a constantly running process, and not using GB of memory when I forget to close it. May not be a big deal on a desktop, but on a laptop having this kind of bloat is obnoxious.

Goronmon

All I can think with this whole situation is how much time is wasted by people getting angry and defensive on behalf of a Valve. It's almost like people have a parasocial relationship with the application itself. That's not even getting to some of the "missing" features. No Community marketplace for in-game items No Direct player-to-player item trading No Digital trading cards, levelling, and points shop I hope more application developers "forget" to add these features.

Svoka

Honestly, I have no idea what business Steam has starting for whopping 5 seconds as it is right now (after the 'speedup'). It is a simple shell for launching already downloaded apps. This is disgrace and nothing to boast about, especially considering Valve takes 30% cut of basically PC gaming marked for making it.

Scharkenberg

So it's a D-measuring contest now? Also, I found the tone of the writing on that site, including the picture of Gabe Newell, kind of obnoxious.

MokaAkashiya

How about actually testing both launchers on same device or at least give startup numbers of steam before/after update? So annoyed by this "comparison" honestly.

square_usual

This is a garbage article, lmao. Comparing architectures as "AI assisted (vibe coded)" and "Optimized modular CEF", and highlighting Steam as being faster in tray restore when it is slower.

messer979

Valve: “thank God we are paying (checks notes) hundreds of thousands to be .5 seconds faster on a desktop app boot. Let’s push out the marketing material!”

dgaaaaaaaaaa

I bet they just removed a wait(5s) from their client :D

freecodeio

epic games can build a launcher that has hard coded bytes and runs on it's own localized cpu space and I would still use steam

ChrisArchitect

Oct 13 source: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/593110/view/71003705...

binlog

Turns out competition works!

hombre_fatal

> Epic may have “vibe coded” a faster client, but Valve proved that targeted optimization on a decades-old ecosystem can still beat out AI speedruns. Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI. I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem. Once I had a good benchmark script, Opus 4.8 or whatever made my terminal app faster with less memory than ghostty and kitty. It's not even interesting.

amelius

First real-world evidence that AI is improving productivity?

add-sub-mul-div

Not that it's specifically relevant to this but it's bloody terrible that we need any launcher at all. A whole generation is barely even aware that you used to able to buy and play a game without an online middleman sitting on your computer.