Epic's rebuilt launcher enters preview; one user reports Unreal workflow gaps

Epic Games has released a preview of its new launcher, which GamesIndustry.biz describes as a beta. Epic says the launcher is a complete rewrite on a new tech stack, covering the shell (download manager, library and the app itself) and the store architecture. Discover and product detail pages were rewritten too.

Epic's performance claims come from Martin Keely, vice president and general manager of Epic Games Store, speaking to IGN. He said startup is twice as fast and the footprint is about 300mb. GamesIndustry.biz reports Epic also claims the launcher is 46% faster than Steam from cold start to the store page, and 14% faster when restoring from the system tray to the library. These are Epic's numbers and we have not seen independent testing.

Epic's blog describes the launcher as "vibe coded", a term for coding with AI. Asked how much AI was involved, Keely said it was used as a tool in development, and that it let a small team rewrite the code base and ship across platforms faster. He said AI work focused on code efficiency and architecture, not art or design. The launcher supports Windows and Mac, and Keely said a Linux version is planned.

For Unreal developers, an early report is worth noting. A Reddit user on r/unrealengine says the preview no longer gives quick access to their UE5 projects and shows old UE4 projects instead. They also say the Version Selector is gone, so they can't open .uproject files manually. Launching the engine directly and opening a matching project, they say, brings up a different-engine-version warning and a prompt to rebuild code. The poster allows they may be doing something wrong, and we have not confirmed any of this.

If you rely on the launcher for engine installs and project management, keep your current launcher setup in place and test the preview on a non-production machine first. Back up your projects before opening them from any new tool. Epic's materials as provided do not say how the preview will handle engine versions or project association.