Epic Games has introduced a new version of its desktop launcher that it says starts more quickly than Steam, the dominant platform in PC game distribution.

The company announced a preview build of the updated launcher on October 14, 2026, stating that it was rebuilt using artificial intelligence tools to rewrite core functionality from the ground up. Martin Keely, General Manager and Vice President of the Epic Games Store, told PC Gamer that the team began with existing features but discarded the previous codebase entirely, using AI to help generate and validate new implementations.

In interviews with IGN, Keely explained that the AI-assisted approach allowed a small development team to reconstruct the launcher more efficiently, enabling faster deployment across Windows, Mac, and an upcoming Linux version. He emphasized that the rewrite was not intended to replicate existing code but to achieve comparable functionality through a new technical foundation.

Epic described the project as "vibe coding," a term referring to using AI to generate code based on informal descriptions rather than traditional programming. The company posted on social media that it had "vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher to be faster than the other guy," accompanied by a link to the preview version.

Independent testing by Ars Technica observed that the new launcher reached the store interface several seconds faster than Steam during cold starts, though differences in subsequent navigation were minimal. Claims about restoration speed from the system tray to the library screen showed a measured improvement of 0.06 seconds, a change too small to be reliably perceived in practical use.

The shift reflects a broader trend of game companies experimenting with AI tools to accelerate software development, though Epic maintains that human oversight remains central to the process.