Steam update tops Epic's AI-built launcher on boot time within 24 hours

Steam responds within a day

According to RespawnFirst, Epic Games launched a preview of its rebuilt launcher on October 14 with a marketing pitch built around a single claim: it starts faster than Steam. Valve's answer arrived roughly a day later. A small Steam client update, pushed within 24 hours of Epic's release, was enough — in community-run tests — to put Steam's startup time back in front of the new Epic client.

The numbers behind the claim

The comparison RespawnFirst republished, credited to Reddit user rustenico, measures two things. On cold boot, Epic Games Launcher V2 (Preview) takes around 5.47 seconds, while the patched Steam client comes in at about 5.23 seconds. On restoring the client from the system tray, Epic still holds an edge: roughly 0.36 seconds against Steam's 0.42 seconds.

The same table contrasts the two engineering approaches. Epic's build is labeled AI-assisted — the "vibe coded" framing from its announcement — while Steam's post-patch client is described as an optimized modular CEF, or Chromium Embedded Framework, architecture.

These are informal measurements on what the article calls basic test systems, not a standardized benchmark suite, so exact times will shift with hardware and configuration. The margin is also small — about a quarter of a second — which makes the symbolic value of the result larger than the practical one.

A faster client, but a familiar feature gap

RespawnFirst credits Epic's V2 as a major step forward compared with the company's slow legacy launcher. But the article argues that performance was never the deepest difference between the two stores, and it lists what Epic still lacks: user-written reviews, discussion forums, community guides, screenshot and artwork sharing, groups and curator recommendations, profile customization, an item marketplace, player-to-player trading, trading cards, universal controller remapping, Big Picture mode, Remote Play, built-in broadcasting, family library sharing, a platform-wide mod hub, personalized discovery queues, local network game file transfers, and game version rollback.

The preview has also drawn early criticism on social media. A post from the account eXtas1s shared on X claims the AI-built store is beset by bugs — unsurprising for a preview build, but at odds with the polish implied by a speed-first launch pitch.

Why it matters

The episode is a compact case study in how platform competition actually works. Epic's headline differentiator — startup speed — survived roughly a day before Valve neutralized it through targeted optimization of a client ecosystem that has been evolving for more than two decades. As RespawnFirst frames it, Epic may have used AI assistance to produce a faster client quickly, but Valve showed that focused tuning of an older codebase can still win the benchmark.

The deeper lesson is that speed was never Steam's moat. The missing features RespawnFirst enumerates represent years of accumulated community tooling and network effects, and none of them can be closed out in a 24-hour patch. For Epic, AI-assisted development delivered a fast rewrite on a short timeline — but this exchange suggests raw performance claims are among the easiest advantages to take away, while ecosystem gaps are among the hardest to close.