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.
show comments
hombre_fatal
> 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.
show comments
Goronmon
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.
show comments
Ameo
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.
show comments
kakuri
Ok but why didn't they do it sooner? The Steam client is terrible and there is no excuse for it.
show comments
mawadev
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
show comments
aucisson_masque
> 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.
show comments
goatking
Thank you Epic for improving Steam! Appreciated
reactordev
Both take way too long because of all that electron bloat. I miss being able to load a small app in under 1s. Everything has telemetry or online verification/updating now.
alecsm
Epic is so bad that I rather pay for a game on Steam than getting it for free on their store.
Scharkenberg
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.
show comments
Aeolun
I think it's more amazing they ever advertised with 'cold start to store' of 5.4 seconds. How is that anywhere near good?!
tym0
Absolutely bonkers to brag about your app taking 5 _entire_ seconds to start...
rpunkfu
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..
show comments
matt3210
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.
show comments
butz
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.
show comments
himata4113
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.
londons_explore
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!
show comments
jonathanlydall
> Your country is not allowed to access this resource
What’s the issue they have with South Africa?
qalmakka
> 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]
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.
giorgioz
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.
forlorn
I've been using Rare for a couple of years, never had a problem. It's much more lightweight and fast.
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
swinglock
Next let's review their RAM usage while idle, shall we?
messer979
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!”
dlcarrier
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?
show comments
sitzkrieg
on the flipside, it takes longer to start the steam client than it does to load and start the first level in half life
nicman23
that is great and all but why was it slow previously
mock-possum
Epic will do anything to beat Valve, apart from actually being better than Valve
add-sub-mul-div
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.
show comments
freecodeio
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
The problem with advertising "vibe coding" is that anyone can do it.
nirav72
Not sure why this is even a comparison. Steam Client has been optimized over years of development and updates.
drnick1
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.
Hamuko
Epic Games seems desperate in its attempts to make gamers like AI.
MokaAkashiya
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.
show comments
rsrsrs86
Totally unsurprising
amelius
First real-world evidence that AI is improving productivity?
dgaaaaaaaaaa
I bet they just removed a wait(5s) from their client :D
show comments
est
They are both terrible.
The old Steam native UI is better.
The best UI I've ever seen is the 2MB Spotify by Ludvig Strigeus (author of µTorrent, @ludde on HN). Instant open, instant play!
lofaszvanitt
Steam client and the Steam webpage still feels like it was stuck in the very early 2000s. Just look at the page source. Ridiculous. Maybe with AI they can finally replace both of those crapmountains.
No proper gallery, terrible video viewing experience. Broadcast live right into your face. I mean they don't swim in pools of money, they can't afford it. The cabals are so busy.... and of course Gabe Newell needs all the money for his shiny brain interface startup :D.
zug_zug
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.
show comments
binlog
Turns out competition works!
VortexLain
At the end of the day, software speed wars are a good thing for the end users.
boxed
Public shaming works.
swiftcoder
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™
square_usual
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.
IshKebab
They're posting this as some kind of gotcha against AI, as if Valve aren't using AI too.
Honestly, I have no idea what business Steam has starting for whopping 5 seconds as it is right now (after the 'speedup').
It is a simple shell for launching already downloaded apps. This is disgrace and nothing to boast about, especially considering Valve takes 30% cut of basically PC gaming marked for making it.
show comments
Capricorn2481
Wow this is really the unthinking man's blog post. This is a known slop news site and HN should not allow it here. I like Steam, but at least Epic actually gave a comparison that we can interpret as two load times on the same PC. These metrics are completely useless without that.
Somebody clipping how long it takes Steam to open on their computer with no other context is pretty meaningless. For all we know, it's running slower on their computer today. There's no before/after, no comparison to Epic. Yet this article just confidently asserted the figure as universal. Moronic.
dualvariable
"avoid stealing focus..."
oh fucking hell, finally. thank you.
show comments
dyauspitr
I really hate all these gaming related wars. I liked it better when arguing about stuff like this was regarded as juvenile. It’s a sign of our times I guess, grown men so withdrawn from the system that these sort of battles are front and center to a lot of them.
viccis
Wake me up when it stops going blank when I have two monitors with different scaling factors. [1]
Epic Games, Inc. owns the RAD Debugger source code yet instead of pointing the clanker (and/or their human(s)!!) at it and saying hey go make a instantaneously-launching high-performance modern library/storefront application based on that, instead they vibecoded up yet another Modern Web Stack travesty that still takes plural seconds to launch—and they have the gall to brag about it as though this is some kind of massive achievement?!
Like, awesome, at least the freaking game launcher/storefront experience is no longer an Unreal Engine game—great work guys, huge improvement, now it's not a total shitshow of unimaginable ineptitude, just a regular, run-of-the-mill shitshow. But that's hardly worth patting yourselves on the back about!
josefresco
Nobody asked for this! We just want more, better and cheaper games! That's it. I could care less how quick it takes to launch an app which then stays open for hours/days.
show comments
xpct
The 'vibe coded' part needs to go. Both teams likely used AI-assisted coding. Neither team's product was completed by robots, not with current tech. Epic had the launcher update ready in advance to handle the bad PR from their announcement. Prepare for more announcements from Epic how AI and not humans solved something.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Ok but why didn't they do it sooner? The Steam client is terrible and there is no excuse for 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
> 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.
Thank you Epic for improving Steam! Appreciated
Both take way too long because of all that electron bloat. I miss being able to load a small app in under 1s. Everything has telemetry or online verification/updating now.
Epic is so bad that I rather pay for a game on Steam than getting it for free on their store.
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.
I think it's more amazing they ever advertised with 'cold start to store' of 5.4 seconds. How is that anywhere near good?!
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..
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.
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.
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.
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!
> Your country is not allowed to access this resource
What’s the issue they have with South Africa?
> 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]
[^1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop
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 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.
I've been using Rare for a couple of years, never had a problem. It's much more lightweight and fast.
https://github.com/RareDevs/Rare
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
Next let's review their RAM usage while idle, shall we?
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!”
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?
on the flipside, it takes longer to start the steam client than it does to load and start the first level in half life
that is great and all but why was it slow previously
Epic will do anything to beat Valve, apart from actually being better than Valve
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
I don't know why anyone's assuming Valve isn't "vibe coding" too.
Does “ai assisted” count as an architecture?
The problem with advertising "vibe coding" is that anyone can do it.
Not sure why this is even a comparison. Steam Client has been optimized over years of development and updates.
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 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.
Totally unsurprising
First real-world evidence that AI is improving productivity?
I bet they just removed a wait(5s) from their client :D
They are both terrible.
The old Steam native UI is better.
The best UI I've ever seen is the 2MB Spotify by Ludvig Strigeus (author of µTorrent, @ludde on HN). Instant open, instant play!
Steam client and the Steam webpage still feels like it was stuck in the very early 2000s. Just look at the page source. Ridiculous. Maybe with AI they can finally replace both of those crapmountains.
No proper gallery, terrible video viewing experience. Broadcast live right into your face. I mean they don't swim in pools of money, they can't afford it. The cabals are so busy.... and of course Gabe Newell needs all the money for his shiny brain interface startup :D.
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!
At the end of the day, software speed wars are a good thing for the end users.
Public shaming 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™
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.
They're posting this as some kind of gotcha against AI, as if Valve aren't using AI too.
Oct 13 source: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/593110/view/71003705...
Honestly, I have no idea what business Steam has starting for whopping 5 seconds as it is right now (after the 'speedup').
It is a simple shell for launching already downloaded apps. This is disgrace and nothing to boast about, especially considering Valve takes 30% cut of basically PC gaming marked for making it.
Wow this is really the unthinking man's blog post. This is a known slop news site and HN should not allow it here. I like Steam, but at least Epic actually gave a comparison that we can interpret as two load times on the same PC. These metrics are completely useless without that.
Somebody clipping how long it takes Steam to open on their computer with no other context is pretty meaningless. For all we know, it's running slower on their computer today. There's no before/after, no comparison to Epic. Yet this article just confidently asserted the figure as universal. Moronic.
"avoid stealing focus..."
oh fucking hell, finally. thank you.
I really hate all these gaming related wars. I liked it better when arguing about stuff like this was regarded as juvenile. It’s a sign of our times I guess, grown men so withdrawn from the system that these sort of battles are front and center to a lot of them.
Wake me up when it stops going blank when I have two monitors with different scaling factors. [1]
1: https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/4299321840544...
Epic Games, Inc. owns the RAD Debugger source code yet instead of pointing the clanker (and/or their human(s)!!) at it and saying hey go make a instantaneously-launching high-performance modern library/storefront application based on that, instead they vibecoded up yet another Modern Web Stack travesty that still takes plural seconds to launch—and they have the gall to brag about it as though this is some kind of massive achievement?!
Like, awesome, at least the freaking game launcher/storefront experience is no longer an Unreal Engine game—great work guys, huge improvement, now it's not a total shitshow of unimaginable ineptitude, just a regular, run-of-the-mill shitshow. But that's hardly worth patting yourselves on the back about!
Nobody asked for this! We just want more, better and cheaper games! That's it. I could care less how quick it takes to launch an app which then stays open for hours/days.
The 'vibe coded' part needs to go. Both teams likely used AI-assisted coding. Neither team's product was completed by robots, not with current tech. Epic had the launcher update ready in advance to handle the bad PR from their announcement. Prepare for more announcements from Epic how AI and not humans solved something.