Patch notes: "we didn't think anyone really gave a shit, but fuck epic"
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2026
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It didn't really bother me before, but it has been kind of slow to start for a long time. Bad enough for me to notice that's it's slow, but not bad enough to feel the need to complain about it.
Now it only takes about 6 seconds for me which is perfectly fine. As someone who only runs Steam when I'm about to play a game through it, it's a very noticeable improvement!
I let it run constantly and never really noticed the load time. Good to hear it is so quick now!
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I open steam exactly once, then never again until I restart my computer. Why would this even matter.
Some people get stuck on performance numbers that don't matter. Like Linux users that say they want 5second boot time instead of 8. Why? Or a sorts car owner that never does track days but likes to tell you their car can do 240km/h...when we have 120km/h road limits.
Or a sorts car owner that never does track days but likes to tell you their car can do 240km/h...when we have 120km/h road limits.
Yeah, but to be fair that V10 Lamborghini Huracán can get up to that speed limit much more quickly than my budget-sports-car Scion tC can. Besides, how are we supposed to know how small their penis is unless they rev their engine up so loud it hurts everyone’s ears?
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Public relations, pride, vengeance?
Companies often take actions which don't directly improve the product for customers but instead offer benefits to the company. Typing that out in 2026 is... It's nice that it isn't pure enshittification for once.
I actually kinda hate that steam is always running.
I get the reasons why, but I would rather just have like a steam updater daemon than the full app running, and would also prefer that Steam starts quickly unless you catch it during the daemon's start up.
The other use case is for HTPC I do not like Big Picture mode as my "home" experience. If you open Steam with game scope it goes into big picture automatically, so it's designed for Steam Machine experiences and not HTPC. The new screensaver feature (which is in beta, so should improve) uses a lot of GPU and polls CPU frequently, so it's actually a bit annoying to have running. I would rather use a more native launcher than the Big Picture mode experience, so you end up having to watch the opening animation frequently to mask the slow startup.
Again, this is pretty mild, and I don't think even PS5 provides a large improvement.
Have you tried small mode? It's a built-in option.
https://www.howtogeek.com/694531/how-to-reduce-steams-ram-usage-from-400-mb-to-60-mb/
https://www.xbitlabs.com/blog/mini-steam/
(The instructions are Windows-centric, but the process is pretty much the same on Linux I think. You can figure it out)
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Epic: I Feel Bad For You
Valve: I Don't Think About You At All
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.
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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
Idk if this is slop, but it's funny
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.
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Tim Sweeny: "Is there anything we are better at than steam? Literally anything? I will take anything we can market, no matter how pathetic and desperate it seems."
Going forward we optimize for "restore from system tray" time. That'll be a game changer.
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As much as I dislike Epic, it’s good that they’re at least trying to compete with Valve. Forces them to actually get out patches like that.
It’s vibe coded, and what they actually need to do is build up their features
It was only very recently you could even look at your own games library. The ecosystem couldn't/wouldn't tell you if you owned a game or not.
They have zero social integration features and it's 2026.
Anybody who defends them is delusional, EPIC are absolute garbage, they are not competing with Valve despite what people keep saying. There is no competition.
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"Reduced artificial delays by half"
- sleep(100)
+ sleep(50)
We have some of this, but it's usually to ensure that some system or hardware is available.
We're a kiosk app on android so get started automatically on boot, and sometimes storage isn't available so we have to delay before loading our config or we get errors.
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How will my splines get reticulated?
Boasting about some improvement being vibe coded is such a confusing disconnect for me. There are so many layers of transparent shit that I cannot see through it.
People dislike epic game launcher for so many reasons. The launch time is something I've never considered important.
The "look how much better we are than X" makes you seem like douchebag. They, don't seem to grasp it, or they will wouldn't boast, and that makes it even worse. Then they admit that it was vibe coded. Why? I become immediately suspicious of the change being done carelessly, isn't properly QA tested, and indicative of a shitty state to begin with. I wasn't going to install the epic launcher on Linux, but now I'm even less likely to do so.
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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?
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.
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Has it? I never noticed. It always been fast for me. 2 seconds is too long?
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As pathetic as Epic is, this is a strong demonstration of why monopolies are bad and competition is needed.
This isn't a case of competition though; Valve didn't slip in a last second speedup to get back at Epic, the patch had already been built and tested and just happened to come out a day after Epic's did.
Its not a random update in response to Epic.
The September 9 beta branch mentioned improved start up time.
Steam quietly improves itself without making big announcements calling out other companies to try to get attention. Its why it has been working on stuff like Proton, steamos, and hardware.
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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?
Huh, I guess competition is good for motivating improvement. Even when you're competing against the kid that eats paste.
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.
Completely irrelevant ofc that the Steam Client is much more than a glorified game shortcut collection with a shop.
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Recently, Epic Games decided to tackle that reputation head-on by unveiling a preview version of its rebuilt Epic Games Launcher V2, which the company proudly noted was developed with heavy AI assistance. Basically, a decade of working on it themselves, no luck, but they got the AI vibes to help and it did a better job… Not the brag they seem to think it is, but let’s roll with it for now.
Damn, do you need something for that burn?
As spotted by reports from RespawnFirst and testing shared on X by user @girlglock_, the updated Steam client now completes a cold boot in just 5.23 seconds on comparable test hardware. That shaves nearly five seconds off the previous figure Epic used in its comparison charts, and edges past the 5.47-second benchmark set by Epic’s new AI-assisted preview build.
They both still start too slowly, 5s to open an application on SSD is slow.
Steam has been working on start up time for a while now, in September they started updating it for the Seam Machine and Big Picture mode, but the whole thing got faster. I'm pretty sure this has been in the beta client for a month, so it seems stupid that Epic would go with such a strong marketing push about how slow steam is on something steam is actively improving.
My best guess is they thought they could put this out while technically true and look good, and nobody would notice when Steam shipped this? Just weird marketing.
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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.
Both of them are using a form of embedded Chromium to display the store, no? Is this really worth competing about then? xD
The Starcraft launcher goes under 1 second on a pentium 1, there.
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