r/gaming • u/doublah • 12h ago

Epic Games' new store is fully vibe-coded, and they're so proud of it they're taking shots at Steam

https://www.destructoid.com/epic-games-store-ai-vibe-coded/
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u/DrFossil 12h ago

A greenfield project being only 50% faster than steam is still pretty bad. Steam is notoriously slow to open which I always suspected to be because of the old codebase and huge list of compatibility requirements.

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u/Capitan_Scythe PC 12h ago

Is it notoriously slow though? Prior to this tweet, I'd never once thought "wish this would hurry up."

Reading through the comments here and elsewhere this has been posted, seems to be a common experience that only Epic seem to think this is some metric worth competing over

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u/bitches_be 12h ago

I mean like 20 years ago yeah

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u/MJOLNIRdragoon 9h ago

Just tested mine. Didn't double click the icon until after I started the timer, and didn't stop it until after the homepage and news popup were fully loaded, not ever trying to be super quick with my reactions: 12.7 seconds. I bet most games take that long or longer to load up to their main menu.

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u/Far_Programmer_5724 5h ago

Steam is not slow enough to make it a conversation. And I always leave it on accidentally. I probably see a cold start once every quarter

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u/cuddlebish 11h ago

It's slow as hell on boot but most people have it always open so you rarely run into that issue.

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u/stonhinge 10h ago

It varies. I rarely have issues. Restarted Steam the other night to force mod updates and it didn't seem slow. No worse than some websites. Infinitely better than some webpages in the early broadband days.

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u/Phailjure 10h ago

It also checks/installs updates on boot, which is a useful feature.

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u/SamLikesJam 4h ago

I just tried booting it up cold and it goes from clicking the icon to logging in and displaying my library in 7 seconds, is that considered slow?

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u/DrFossil 12h ago

Maybe it's slower on Linux. I was also using a pretty old laptop until very recently so that was probably part of it, but yeah it's slow.

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u/ultimateknackered 10h ago

It's not slower on Linux. Plus, once it's up, it's up. I rarely reboot my computer, so Steam is always just sitting there ready to rock after the initial launch.

It is pretty weird that launcher start time is a hill people want to die on.

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u/tempinator 4h ago

It is pretty weird that launcher start time is a hill people want to die on.

This was my thought as well lol, like I guess it's nice, but as far as my list of "things that are important to me in a games store/launcher", cold boot time is...really low on that list. Almost to the point of being irrelevant.

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u/Antique_Pin5266 11h ago

It’s serviceable on a Steam Deck which runs on Linux and like PS4 specs

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u/fearless-fossa 11h ago

It's slow for what it does, but it's fast enough to not matter for 99.9% of people.

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u/BellerophonM 10h ago

It seems like Steam either goes a pretty decent clip or gets itself into a situation where it's constantly irritatingly slow. I'm the latter.

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u/CONCAVE_NIPPLES 8h ago

I timed opening Steam on Windows 11 and it took about 6 seconds to get to the store. Granted this wasn't from cold boot as I had to change my settings from Library to Store on open

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u/chicaneuk 17m ago

I mean I've always felt it loads unreasonably slow BUT I also don't care in so much as I boot my PC in the morning and shut it down at night.. so Steam taking 30 seconds or so to launch itself is of no consequence.

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u/Youutternincompoop 11h ago

it takes me like a minute+ to load but that's just because my hard drive literally failed and has a tenth of its original read/write speed lol(its over a decade old at this point and I'm gonna replace it eventually)

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u/Capitan_Scythe PC 10h ago

I feel like that may not be something that Steam should be held accountable for. Having said that, can totally see Sweeney's next tweet being

"Steam's poor performance to blame for user with decade old hardware."

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u/Youutternincompoop 10h ago

I don't blame steam for it lmao, I think people are downvoting me thinking I blame steam for my old ass hard drive slowly dying like I'm somehow not aware that it's my failing hard drive which is making steam run slow.

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u/Capitan_Scythe PC 10h ago

Made me chuckle, so have done what I can to counter the downvotes

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u/Zikro 9h ago

It feels mega slow. It’s like the modern day equivalent of the shader compilation loading screen before the main menu. Click icon and then wait like 10 seconds before any hint of activity and then half the time it’s a new update being installed. Honestly I click the icon more than once frequently because I don’t know if it’s opening or not. Don’t really ever have that problem with any other application.

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u/NouZkion 10h ago

Steam is notoriously slow to open

Are we sure about that? Because it opens pretty much instantly for me and I built this computer back in 2017. The only time it's slow to open is when there's an update available, and even then it's downloaded, installed, and running in less than 30 seconds.

Who are these mysterious users with a slow Steam startup time and why are they still on hard drives?

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u/TheFreak235 1h ago

I have an old laptop with a hard drive only and my steam still only takes like 15 seconds when there’s an update.

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u/BlackOcelotStudio 10h ago

I boot steam about 5 times a year, which is the amount of times windows manages to forcefully restart my pc without consent, so I'll be strongly considering Epic's offer: on one side, I save 25 seconds a year; on the other, I lose nearly every feature that makes my games library useable; hmm, sounds like a good trade-off.

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u/asdufnaksu2 10h ago

Old codebase? I thought steam is using chromium since some years instead of old legacy code, so it's basically a browser.