alt Hacker NewsSteam Client is now faster than Epic's new vibe coded launcher
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> Epic may have “vibe coded” a faster client, but Valve proved that targeted optimization on a decades-old ecosystem can still beat out AI speedruns.
Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI.
I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
Once I had a good benchmark script, Opus 4.8 or whatever made my terminal app faster with less memory than ghostty and kitty. It's not even interesting.
> No Discussion forums and community hubs
> No User-written text reviews
> No Community-created guides and walkthroughs
>No Screenshot, clip, and artwork sharing
I can’t believe they don’t have the resource to bring these features to their launcher, they actively refuse to make it a tool for communities.
It must be a way to buy game and launch them, that’s all. Don’t talk, don’t give your opinion on the game, don’t help others in forums,..
I managed to stay away from epic even when they locked games from steam, glad I did. It’s embarrassing.
All I can think with this whole situation is how much time is wasted by people getting angry and defensive on behalf of a Valve. It's almost like people have a parasocial relationship with the application itself.
That's not even getting to some of the "missing" features.
No Community marketplace for in-game items
No Direct player-to-player item trading
No Digital trading cards, levelling, and points shop
I hope more application developers "forget" to add these features.
Ok but why didn't they do it sooner? The Steam client is terrible and there is no excuse for it.
This is why software is slow and everything uses 2GB of RAM at idle: because nobody really cares.
I'm sure that AI made this speedup work much easier and quicker; probably just access to the monorepo and a prompt of "make the launcher boot up faster while changing no functionality. Keep track of before/after benchmark numbers" would be fine as long as you can get your co-workers to approve whatever diff gets spat out the end.
But either of these companies, presumably with dev teams of dozens-hundreds of SWEs, could have pointed to one of them 5 years go and said "spend the next 2 months optimizing the performance of the launcher" and would probably have gotten similar results.
I make my software fast and efficient mostly because I enjoy it. Absolutely nothing stopping web apps, Electron, everything else from being efficient, slim, and performant. It's just that the modicum of effort required to set that up was outweighed by the convenience of just importing and parsing the full 16MB icon cache and 13 unused analytics SDKs every pageload and not worrying about it.
I have to say, Epics vibe is just malicious and toxic. Steam is silent and just lets things speak for themselves. What is the value of an idea if it does not work in the real world?
I just wish the people at Epic collectively took some vacation and came back with a less breathing down neck attitude towards everything. Just chill out, relax, it is a browser for searching, buying and downloading games
Thank you Epic for improving Steam! Appreciated
Epic is so bad that I rather pay for a game on Steam than getting it for free on their store.
There are broken windows everywhere I look when people are using AI, including the launcher. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory even with large companies the acceptance of small issues here and there is concerning.
So it's a D-measuring contest now? Also, I found the tone of the writing on that site, including the picture of Gabe Newell, kind of obnoxious.
Absolutely bonkers to brag about your app taking 5 _entire_ seconds to start...
App to launch apps is loading in little over 5s, on what I assume is high-end gaming pc.
Truly something to be proud of..
And that's why having some competition is useful for consumers. I would like to see this trend to continue and game launchers improving not only startup times, but RAM usage and disk size usage. I just looked into my `.steam` directory, and it is taking up over 10GB of disk size, and I have only single game installed, that is only about 500MB in size.
Now patiently waiting for GOG answer to this competition.
Totally unsurprising
> CEF
Ah that's the reason why they came up with an instant speedup. Optimising CEF is basically like docking a zero from your speedup loop [1]
When you vibe code and tell your agent to "keep working till everything loads inside 100 milliseconds", you end up with a super hideous codebase which does insane things like having a custom memory allocator, handwritten assembly, etc etc.
It is fast though!
I had suspected that they simply invoked client ready faster and let misc information fetch in background. After a little bit of reversing they did infact just make the client spawn earlier.
Steam client was always fast, majority of load time is (and forever will be) network speed.
> Your country is not allowed to access this resource
What’s the issue they have with South Africa?
What are the possibilities of AI learning how to code efficient apps, e.g. low memory apps, or faster apps, or both? I feel like that is the kind of cheap work that requires too much intelligence for humans, yet provides immense benefits to users.
Just recently I learned Listary has a new beta written in Rust. It is fast! The previous one kept crashing. Asking AI to code Rust style, is probably a shortcut method.
I've been using Rare for a couple of years, never had a problem. It's much more lightweight and fast.
I think vibe coding will force everyone to stay on their toes and keep being at the edge, moat defences have lowered and competition is up, as consumers we will get much better products for much cheaper. Let's just hope there is enough people left with jobs to pay for the services and the others can re-invent theirselves in a career that is still valuable in an LLM world.
If this is the start of epic competing on features and quality for both devs and players instead of just buying up exclusive rights then I'm all for it
I don't know why anyone's assuming Valve isn't "vibe coding" too.
on the flipside, it takes longer to start the steam client than it does to load and start the first level in half life
Next let's review their RAM usage while idle, shall we?
The problem with advertising "vibe coding" is that anyone can do it.
Can we stop putting Chrome in everything? Why does it take billions of instructions and hundreds of thousands to billions of bytes of RAM to display some text and pictures?
Valve: “thank God we are paying (checks notes) hundreds of thousands to be .5 seconds faster on a desktop app boot. Let’s push out the marketing material!”
that is great and all but why was it slow previously
Not that it's specifically relevant to this but it's bloody terrible that we need any launcher at all. A whole generation is barely even aware that you used to able to buy and play a game without an online middleman sitting on your computer.
epic games can build a launcher that has hard coded bytes and runs on it's own localized cpu space and I would still use steam
Not sure why this is even a comparison. Steam Client has been optimized over years of development and updates.
At the end of the day, software speed wars are a good thing for the end users.
It may be faster than Epic, but it is still unreasonably slow for something that really does very little at the end of the day. It's quite tragic that the company that brought us Proton and Windows games on Linux at near equal performance can't do a better job with the client or can't be bothered to improve it. That, and the decades old bugs in Half Life, Left 4 Dead and other classic games that probably still generate not insignificant revenue.
Epic will do anything to beat Valve, apart from actually being better than Valve
Epic Games seems desperate in its attempts to make gamers like AI.
How about actually testing both launchers on same device or at least give startup numbers of steam before/after update? So annoyed by this "comparison" honestly.
First real-world evidence that AI is improving productivity?
I bet they just removed a wait(5s) from their client :D
Public shaming works.
Great. Now make it not need a constantly running process, and not using GB of memory when I forget to close it. May not be a big deal on a desktop, but on a laptop having this kind of bloat is obnoxious.
Turns out competition works!
It is incredibly funny that Steam could have fixed this at any time, but didn't prioritise doing so until Epic openly challenged them. This is why we can't have nice things™
They're posting this as some kind of gotcha against AI, as if Valve aren't using AI too.
This is a garbage article, lmao. Comparing architectures as "AI assisted (vibe coded)" and "Optimized modular CEF", and highlighting Steam as being faster in tray restore when it is slower.
I used to think vibe coding would get us slow Electron apps but now we got speed wars between game launchers. I hope this comes for all types of software.
With that said, I tested it right now and Steam takes about 2 seconds to restore from tray and 10-15 for cold boot. The new Epic launcher is around 0.5 and 5 like the article mentioned. Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something.