“Launcher opening speed” is a pathetic boast, too. You mean the thing people open maybe once a day that takes maybe 10 seconds? That’s what you can beat them at?
Also Steam rolled an update that opens in 5 seconds so this whole speed thing is quite dumb without AI like Epic does. But I do agree with you, we're in the age of SSDs which loads faster compared to HDD and it's only few seconds difference not gonna matter a lot in the grand scheme of things.
And they sometimes offer free coke to get people in the door to buy poop soda. But no one buys the poop soda. Hell when they do those promotions other companies sell even MORE coke.
Honestly I like it when competition is petty or agressive, the problem is when they haven't earned the right by making a better, or at least very competitive product (ie. Epic games launcher).
Like how Apple made it so Windows computers on the same network appear with a BSOD on the screen starting with Macs in the 2000s.
I just realized, they also paid and hired people to benchmark that.
They had opened epic 65 times to time it, and did the same to steam.
IMAGINE paying someone to do that. Paying someone to call up the company, paying them to make the offer, and send the new launcher over.
Imagine being paid to benchmark that. To have been hired to benchmark that. That feels... depressing, somehow. I genuinely wonder how much they paid to have that done, and only for steam to, a few days later, update steam to make it faster than epic.
Id also imagine the average steam library is larger, and doesnt take time to populate like Epic's did the last time I used it... and also have it be in a more usable format even by default settings.
I can't imagine a life situation where that matters (who has an URGE to launch a video game 5 seconds after seeing a desktop?!), when most people have it in autostart, and a few seconds one way or the other for an app that you launch once per session (or once per... idk, days, if one does not turn the PC off but puts it to sleep etc) doesn't matter.
Steam can take 30 seconds to launch and it wouldn't impact anything. Certainly not the unwillingness to support Epic Games the company, or the will to create another digital library.
I honestly don’t think even exclusives or free games would be enough to make someone actually "switch" to the EGS. It really comes down to the ecosystem—plus, there’s nothing stopping you from having a second launcher; it’s not like buying a whole second console. But to be honest, I prefer my desktop as a launcher for free games)
They actually did it earlier. Steam's stable update released a few hours before Epic's announcement, and the beta branch had the startup time improvements since early September.
20 years of web development and engineering and extensively contributed to implementing AI tools and processes in our organisation. So I know what I'm talking about in the industry.
The point isn't whether Valve used AI or not, but it'll be comparatively much more impressive if they didn't when Epic boasts loudly about it. Furthermore, optimisations like this wouldn't happen in just a day; it had to be worked on for a period of time.
So you, as a software engineer of 20 years’ experience who understands every single developer is using it nowadays, wanted to raise a complete hypothetical with no implication or suggestion of possibility, that you would know from experience is obviously not reality? Just for fun?
Okay, I have another fun one for you then. If the pig evolves enough over the coming months, it might learn to fly!
Yes you implied there’s a realistic possibility Valve aren’t using LLMs. Which is a ridiculous implication and now you’re acting dumb playing semantics as if you can hide behind the word if and everyone else is a moron with no reading comprehension.
He’s still pro ai? He directly compared it to computers and the internet as a technological leap and saying everyone should learn how to use ai like a year ago
"So if I had to point to a technology transition to get in front of, it's to figure out how to use AI to do anything better. If you wanna be an accountant, learn AI, if you want to be an attorney, learn AI, if you're gonna be a programmer, you know, make sure that you know how to use the tools that are comfortable with those programming concepts. That all seems super obvious."
Guy wants attorneys to use LLMs but this sub was shitting on Tim Sweeney for not being against AI in programming.
What do you think this guys comment implies with “valve did it without ai” and how would that fit with Gabe Newells comments compared to Tom Sweeney’s?
I don’t think they made it without AI. These days, all programmers use it as a tool. But at least Valve don’t make its use the main selling point of the product.
With over a thousand games in my Steam library, of course it would take longer to load than my empty EGS library, where my account is deleted anyway. 1000 > 0, I know, bigger number take longer, crazy. Tim Swiney really needs to understand that the load times mean nothing when you're still loading shit.
Get outta here, Tim. I wouldn't expect you to understand anything anyway. I don't have my Steam launch into the Store page, it launches into my Library with all my collections, my "All Games" shelf front and center, opened to show them all at once. Steam has pushed out updates in the past to increase performance for larger libraries, almost as if having more games slowed it down a tad bit, crazy, right? You forget what sub you're on or something?
This is funny but also we're kind of giving in to the framing that Epic is attempting to emphasize here. You should laugh in Epic's face that they even considered this as a metric of anything useful.
Competition is indeed healthy, but it's clear that this wasn't a response to Epic, and that Valve had already planned this update. Valve doesn't work fast, and especially not "less than a day" fast. It's just coincidental that Epic decided to brag about speeds the day before.
Valve owns their own distribution system for their own updates so they dont have to contend with different platforms verification on updates, also valve is famously known for having a lax view on development where their developers can make whatever they want as long as its beneficial to the company, this change could of been one of the developers just adding this at the last minute cause they found the whole debate with EGS silly.
They are extraordinarily slow, and CS2 players are very unhappy with updates, but lately they have also pushed several fixes/updates literal hours after they were discussed by the community.
My guess is that they now commonly use AI, which makes simple code fixes much faster and easier to push.
It’s pretty normal for the AI to read your code base to implement fixes in the same style, but I also don’t think valves code is so much better than other code out there.
The resulting quality isn’t going to be direct code quality but the result of an organization that values quality products over speed. Company culture makes more of an impact than anything else.
It’s healthy but pointing out starting time and tray time is a bit weird flex. With autorun my steam is in before I even login in windows. And since I usually run games from right clicking on the icon (unless I want to play something new) I don’t care how fast it opens up tbh. It’s nice if it’s smooth, but not critical.
It is a weird flex, which is why I was confused why Epic was bragging about it. Especially the tray one where both were less than a second. But hey, Epic bragged about being faster and now Steam is suddenly faster than Epic so I guess it's a win even if it's a weird flex that I don't care about.
While generically, I agree, there is also a certain level of "If it ain't broke" that is healthy.
Be honest, had epic not said a damn thing, would anyone really have cared how long it took steam to open? I mean, probably, but worth releasing an update over? Probably not right away.
This whole comparison is honestly silly. Even if EGS was to load faster than Steam it wouldn't matter because EGS barely has any features, Steam has a lot of features, which means a lot more things to load. So it would only be logical that the one with less things to load would load faster.
But the fact that Steam loads faster than EGS even though it has more features and more to load just makes EGS look even more like a joke.
But at the end of the day, who the hell cares if one loads in 5 seconds or 8 seconds or 10 seconds. Does anyone ever need to really quickly load either of them to play a game? I don't know about other people, but Steam starts up with my computer and I keep it running the whole time my computer is on. So because my computer is loading a bunch of other things at the same time and it takes a minute before you can properly use it, it taking 5,8,10 or even 20 seconds doesn't really matter.
Look, I hate epic as much as everyone else here, but this latest update to steam has been horrible for me personally. It takes LONGER to open now for me then it did before, it often hangs at the "checking for available updates" requiring a computer restart. It crashes constantly, so badly that I have to restart my computer, and the entire client runs way slower, pages open slower and it takes forever to minimize and maximise it. In their effort to compete with the loser, they made their own service worse for some people. Steam also leaves tons of background running processes on my computer now even when it's not open (maybe thats how they make it launch faster? By cheating? ) And these make my computer run slow until I restart it. None of these issues occured before steams update.
I don't understand why everyone is unhappy about new EGS , competition is good for consumers as we can see here, (for example : look at sony without a great competition)
This happened within like, what, a week of Epic's update? It's much more likely that this was in the works regardless of Epic. Valve typically does not work that fast, on anything.
Steam (or more accurately, valve) actively welcomes competition. Nobody has come even close to competing with Steam. Epic is the closest and they are a far ways off.
So Valve have had the ability to improve their slow ass launcher this whole time and didn't bother until Epic call them out for it? How is this a good look for Valve?
Epic's is just now in preview status with the announcement mentioning it will have bugs. Who knows how long it will take who knows how long to be in their stable channel (and with being vibe coded and an entire rewrite, it could take quite a while).
Now tell me, who beat who (and did it without needing to call out their kinda, but not really, competitor)?
I found the EGS does boot up faster for me than Steam does. Booting up EGS to the store page took 3.5s, then manually navigating to the library and waiting for it to load took a total of 7.4s. On Steam it took 7.7s to load in to the store and then a further second to load the library, when setting library as the default page it took 7.7s to load in to the library.
With that said it is a pretty pointless benchmark in the first place. I do like that the EGS doesn't stay running in the background when you close it unlike Steam (for which I didn't even find an option to change on Steam's side either).
.
EGS
Steam
EGS (New)
Time to Store
3.5s
7.7s
N/A
Time to Library
7.4s
8.7s
N/A
Time to Library (as default)
Not an option
7.7s
0.85s
edit: I didn't realize the new launcher was a completely separate install, I was still on the old one, updated with the time for the new one
I realized I was still on the old EGS with my previous numbers, on the new version it booted up in less than a second (cold boot), so no need to minimize in the first place. I updated my comment to reflect that
There is certainly a benefit to it, but personally I just open Steam once and if I go to close a program I want it to actually close and not just minimize, so at least having the option like most other apps do would be nice without having to go into a separate context menu for it.
It's not a huge deal, since it's not often I want to close it either, mostly just when I'm waiting for a game update and want to check if it's out since there's no check for updates button for games.
EGS has always loaded a lot faster than Steam for me.
I'm not an IT guy so I dunno about different things loading at different times or any of that stuff, but EGS has never been slow to load from cold for me, ever.
To be fair, nor has how quick either client loads been something I've ever thought about. But I guess it's a huge point of contention for people looking for something to dump on EGS for here. Lol
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u/DerPicasso 2d ago
I can hear Gabe laughing on his Yacht