Epic says the fully rebuilt Epic Games Store launcher could deliver an average five-times faster cold start and up to 6.5-times faster restoration from the system tray to the library. Slides shown at Unreal Fest suggest the company is not only targeting performance, but also redesigning the store’s structure, game pages, and community features.

If PC gamers were asked which digital game store or platform they preferred, it would be surprising to see the Epic Games Store win anything more than a tiny share of the vote. The service does not have a particularly strong reputation even among people who rarely use it, while players with larger libraries have often described it as slow, clumsy, and frustrating. That may begin to change soon, however, because Epic appears to be preparing a substantial update.

Plans for a technical overhaul of the Epic Games Store were already made public in February, when store general manager Steve Allison described the improvement as “pretty profound.”

New slides shown at Unreal Fest and posted on X by Pirat_Nation now point to a completely redesigned launcher. Epic claims that the ground-up rebuild will result in an average “5x faster cold start” and an average “6.5x faster systray restore to library.” In practical terms, the app should launch much more quickly, whether it is opened from a fully closed state or restored directly from the Windows system tray.

For people with smaller libraries, the Epic Games Store is not always unbearably slow, but users with larger collections have been complaining about its sluggish performance for years. The issue was already discussed in 2023 during comparisons between Epic’s official client and the Heroic Launcher, where it became clear that the system could slow down considerably once a player’s library started to grow.

The client can be irritating even beyond its performance problems. When launching a game, it is not always immediately obvious whether the app will start the title right away or simply open more information, while downloads can appear in a separate window, making even basic actions feel more cumbersome than they need to be.

According to the Unreal Fest slides, the redesigned Epic Games Store will also add several convenience and content-focused features:

• personalized game recommendations on the home page;
• quick-access categories for easier single-page browsing;
• product detail pages tailored to each player, connecting them to a game’s community, story, and their own progression;
• patch notes directly on game storefronts.

February’s plans also included testing community and forum features around some of the store’s leading games, while player profiles, avatars, private messaging, voice chat, and game-independent parties were also mentioned as possible additions. According to Pirat_Nation, Epic may also introduce cross-region game gifting, publisher-funded coupons, and a tool that helps players check how games would run on their systems.

Much of this naturally sounds very similar to the way Valve has handled things on Steam for years, but that is not a bad thing. Most PC gamers are already familiar with Steam’s approach, and for good reason: when someone opens a game page, they want to find everything relevant to that title in one place, whether that means patch notes, reviews, community content, or anything else connected to the game. The real question now is whether Epic’s rebuild will arrive soon enough and whether it will genuinely deliver on its promises of speed. Launchers are tools, after all, not products in their own right, and they should stay out of the way as much as possible.

Source: PC Gamer