Epic Games Is Rebuilding Its Launcher From Scratch, Targeting a 5x Speed Improvement

Epic Admits the Problem, Then Shows the Fix

Epic Games spent years letting its launcher become a running joke among PC gamers. Then, earlier this year, an Epic exec told Eurogamer it flat-out sucks. Now the company is putting its cards on the table.

At Unreal Fest, Epic presented slides, parts of which were posted to X by user LuKaOnIndeed, detailing a rebuild called Launcher V2. The headline numbers: five times faster on a cold start, 6.5 times faster when restoring from the system tray. Those are significant gaps to close, not incremental polish.

Epic's own slide said it plainly: "every developer in this room and every player we have has experienced challenges with the current launcher." That's a company acknowledging a product failure in public, which at least skips the usual corporate denial phase.

Why This Matters Beyond Inconvenience

Gamers have gone to great lengths to access their free games claimed on the Epic Games Store through Steam to avoid the launcher's slow and clunky design. When your own free-game giveaway strategy gets undermined by your own software, the problem is structural.

Epic's February press release confirmed the company is "in the process of rebuilding the underlying architecture of the Epic Games Store Launcher" and plans to ship improvements this summer. No specific release date has been given for Launcher V2 beyond that window.

What's in the Roadmap

Beyond speed, Epic's Unreal Fest slides outlined several storefront improvements running alongside the launcher rebuild:

• In-store patch notes so players know what changed before they download an update
• Player reviews built into the store itself
• Quick-access categories for faster navigation
• A personalized home page

None of these are revolutionary features. Steam has had most of them for years. GOG has them. Even smaller storefronts have them. The honest read is that Epic is playing catch-up on basics that competitors shipped long ago.

The Rollout Plan

Launcher V2 goes through a private beta before any public release. Epic has not announced who gets into the private beta, when invites go out, or what the criteria are. The "this summer" timeline from the February press release is the only public anchor point.

The Fair Counterpoint

The strongest pushback against criticism of Epic's pace is this: rebuilding underlying software architecture is genuinely hard. A launcher that serves millions of users across wildly different PC configurations cannot be swapped out overnight without risking breakage. Epic choosing a private beta before a public rollout is the responsible call, not a stalling tactic. The Unreal Fest transparency itself—publicly showing a roadmap with metrics attached—is a step beyond what many companies do when fixing failures.

That said, the urgency took years to materialize. Epic has had the resources and the engineering talent to address this far sooner. The pace of improvement on the store side has consistently lagged the pace of its free-game marketing.

What's Actually Unresolved

The five-times-faster claim comes from Epic's own internal presentation, not an independent benchmark. Until Launcher V2 is in public users' hands and third parties can test it, those numbers are targets, not verified results. The private beta will be the first real test of whether the architecture rebuild delivers what the slide deck promises.

The bigger open question is whether Epic can hold the summer timeline. The February press release said improvements are coming "this summer." If the private beta hasn't launched publicly by then, Epic will have a credibility problem on top of a launcher problem.