Nearly eight years after Epic took over Steam with its own game store and launcher, the fortnite The manufacturer is implementing a new tool to give it an edge over Valve: vibration encoding.
In announcing the new publicly available “Preview” version of its Epic Games Launcher, Epic writes that “coding is hard. So instead of doing that, we coded a new Epic Games Launcher that’s much faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look and feel.” And while that may sound a little ironic, Epic Games Store general manager and vice president Martin Keely told PC Gamer that the team “started from scratch” and used AI as “a tool to write and review new features and new capabilities from scratch on a different technology stack than we had previously.” The goal, Keely said, was to “look at the functionality that existed [in the current Epic Games Launcher] and [say] “We want to replicate that, but not the code itself.”
Speaking to IGN, Keely clarified that using AI to code the new Launcher “made us more efficient and allowed a small team to rewrite the code base and be able to run it faster on all platforms, support Windows and Mac, and we will also have a Linux version.”
We vibration-coded the Epic Games launcher to be faster than the other one.
Don’t you believe us? Try it yourself in Preview:
– Epic Games Store (@EpicGames) October 14, 2026
The focus on launch speed extends to Epic’s social media announcement, which once again emphasizes that “we coded the Epic Games Launcher to be faster than the other one.” Ars’ own testing confirms that the new Launcher goes from a cold start to the store page a few seconds faster than Steam (assuming no login or update issues get in the way). Epic also claims that the new Launcher can restore from the system tray to the Library screen a little faster than Steam, although the claimed 0.06 second difference in this seems so small as to go unnoticed (and was in our tests).
