Without any flashy marketing campaigns or social media fanfare, Valve rolled out a routine Steam Client update containing a very simple line in the patch notes: “Improved Steam Client startup performance.”
Steam is great at being fetter free and no bells and whistles service. They just do what the customers want rather than being pro-greedy milkers who push customers to accept what they don’t want.
Who gives a shit even with a 5s difference
At least on arch and on my hardware it is the difference of ~2s and ~8s, launching 4x as fast is substantial.
Still not using it over heroic tho.
Steam sucking in 3-2-1…
Even if Steam was slower, it’s a better platform. When I go to a game’s store page on Steam I learn literally everything about it. Literally everything I need to know. Because there’s user reviews. Because there’s a link to the forums.
EGS doesn’t have user input. They don’t even include as many vids/screenshots. It’s all very low effort and I have to go elsewhere to figure things out about the product.
Launch times don’t matter to me. I never shut Steam down, and I almost never open EGS. What an odd metric to boast about, anyway. Launch time is the least of EGS’ problems.
If it was so easy why has it taken so long?
In what world is anything over a second acceptable. All launchers are otherly horrible.
In what world does that matter? Do you start Steam 50 times a day? Website, sure, you open thousands a day, but Steam? You open it once maximum twice a day.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/710037059469839721
The actual update post from Valve. Why is it not linked in the article? The notes are huge, with many things improved. Off course one of the improvements would probably lead to better loading times. This isn’t a response to Epic Games, this is a main update developed way before.
Avoid stealing focus when the Steam main window opens, if another window was activated during startup/login.
Holy hell finally. This has annoyed me for so damn long.
please understand, they’re a starving indie company
This annoys me too, not only with Steam. But I thought this is an issue on my operating system. I wasn’t aware this could be solved by the client side.
Honestly, that makes it even better to me. Here’s Epic bragging about beating Steam in some way meanwhile Valve’s like “here’s a little something we’ve been working on for a while. No biggy.”
Steam stays winning
And to add to that this was already part of the Beta update from 9. September
Idk if this is slop, but it’s funny
As Steam has been extremely slow to launch for quite some time now, anybody want to take a stab at why it took an Epic Games taunt for them to take care of it?
Because most people don’t care.
You think they only waited for epic to drop an update as if they monitor them from the inside?
That’s a next level conspiracy theory lol
Has it? I never noticed. It always been fast for me. 2 seconds is too long?
Could be you have it set to start up when you boot your computer, as it’s pretty quick to “launch” when it’s actually already running but hidden in the system tray. I have it set to be manually launched on mine and yeah 10 seconds sounds about right for what I’m used to (haven’t restarted since the update).
From what others said, this has been in the beta. Epic tried to beat this release just to be able to technically say they were faster for a day.
Ah. So there you go. And it will go down in history written in stone and people will still be talking about it 100 years from now
EGS loads faster because there’s fewer features to load.
Vibe coding is the most overused tech term I’ve ever seen in my life. Stfuuuuuuuuu.
In my opinion, respectfully disagreed. So many professional engineers i work with or hire now forget how to code. We now allow LLMs but you must read every single line and be able to audit and explain your stack as if you read every line. And we don’t allow them for anything larger than simple functions. They are attrociously inefficient. Yet so many execs and devs think they are super intelligent. Hence why we need to call out vibe coding.
My “Hello, World!” script boots approximately 18000x faster than the Epic launcher.
The difference in features between the two is about the same as it is between Steam and the Epic launcher.
Technically correct, practically wrong, they are both gaming store bloat apps but steam is a steaming (!) pile of a webshite that takes longer to load than some games (for me at least) and uses 700mb of ram/vram.
Technically correct, practically wrong
This is exactly the point made with the ridiculous Hello World-example. It’s a parody of the original post. Epic is technically correct, but practically wrong.
The Epic store shopping cart died for this.
Who the fuck cares if the fast launcher is a piece of crap with a fraction of features needed for a good library and storefront?
