As reported earlier this week, Epic Games founder, president, and largest shareholder Tim Sweeney was featured in a massive interview with Lex Fridman. The highlight of the conversation was the unexpected mention of Unreal Engine 6 progress, but in the four-hour-long chat, Tim Sweeney also addressed some of the feedback on the Epic Games Launcher, which is often criticized in comparison to Valve’s Steam client. Sweeney admitted to the launcher’s faults, but also stressed that Valve has had a lot more time to mature its platform.
I think one of the reasons that people characterize the Epic Games launcher as clunky is because the Epic Games launcher is clunky and we need to improve this. There’s a lot of work going on there and, you know, I wish we’d gotten better at addressing quality of life features and prioritize them above all of the other features.
Steam has 15 years of built-up work by many of the best programmers in the whole industry working on that. It’s a much larger team working on Steam and a lot more time working on it, so we’ve had to make a lot of prioritization decisions about what do we support with the Epic Game Store and when.
A lot of the time, it’s been supporting commercial features like merchandising, offering multiple versions of a game for sale, and offering upgrades from the regular edition to the deluxe edition and other things that partners work.
Other priorities have been quality of life and launcher load times and other things. And we’ve not put enough emphasis on the quality of life features. We’ve recognized this very clearly multiple times, and we’ve gone through multiple refactorings. But that’s definitely been a disappointment to us and to a lot of users. One thing it took us a while to realize was it’s not in uniform.
Depending on your proximity to a CDN and the size of your game collection, it can be either awesome or really clunky. And the users for whom it’s really clunky are the people behind a large part of the complaints. I should also say that the Steam launcher, for a long time, from my memory, but also just looking online, was also very clunky in the beginning.
While Sweeney has a point, it should be clarified that the Epic Games Launcher can no longer be considered at its beginning, having launched in December 2018. There’s still a lot of room for improvement on the client, that’s for sure.
