Nearly eight years after launching its own PC game store, Epic Games—the company behind Fortnite—is introducing a new tool in its competition with Valve: a redesigned Epic Games Launcher built using “vibe coding.”

Epic says its new launcher was built from scratch with AI

In an announcement about the new public preview builds of the Epic Games Launcher, Epic wrote: “Programming is hard, so instead we’ve vibecoded a new Epic Games Launcher that’s much faster, more responsive, and has a new look than the current one.”

The wording may be tongue-in-cheek, but Epic Games Store General Manager and Vice President Martin Keeley told PC Gamer that the team “started from scratch” and used AI as a “tool to create and review new features and functionality from the ground up with a different technology stack than before.”

Keeley said the team focused on the current Epic Games Launcher’s capabilities and aimed to reproduce them without copying the original codebase.

In comments to IGN, Keeley said using AI to develop the new launcher could “improve efficiency, allow smaller teams to rewrite the codebase, allow faster launches across platforms, support Windows and Mac, and plan to have a Linux version as well.”

We’ve vibe-coded the Epic Games Launcher to be faster than most.

Don’t you believe us? Test it yourself in the preview.

— Epic Games Store (@EpicGames) October 14, 2026

Epic claims the new launcher starts faster than Steam

Startup speed is a major focus of the redesign. In its social media announcement, Epic again emphasized that it “vibe-coded the Epic Games Launcher faster than anyone else.”

Ars Technica’s testing found that the new launcher reaches the store page several seconds faster than Steam during a cold start, assuming no login or update issues interfere. Epic also claims that the launcher can return from the system tray to the library screen slightly faster than Steam.

However, the claimed 0.06-second difference is small enough to be unnoticeable—and it was unnoticeable in testing.