Epic Games has released a preview of its completely revamped Epic Games Store game launcher for Windows, macOS, and for the first time, Linux. The new client is lighter, faster, less demanding on the system, and features a redesigned interface.
Epic Games has released a preview of its completely revamped Epic Games Store game launcher for Windows, macOS, and for the first time, Linux. The new client is lighter, faster, less demanding on the system, and features a redesigned interface.
The company announced the release on its official Epic Games Store website. The developers jokingly noted that they had tweaked the new app to make it run faster than its competitors.
“Programming is hard. So instead, we’ve enthusiastically created the new Epic Games Launcher, which is much faster and more responsive than the current version, and has a refreshed look. Think of it as a speedboat, not a yacht,” the Epic Games Store team said.
Key updates include an improved library section, where you can now view details for each game in a separate window, create your own collections, customize the top bar, and connect libraries from other PC stores for cross-platform viewing. In addition, the developers have redesigned the download manager, adding detailed monitoring of data read and write speeds.
It is noted that the "cold start" of the program takes 5.47 seconds, which is 46% faster than Steam, which takes 10.07 seconds. Restoring the program from the system tray to the library takes 0.36 seconds compared to 0.42 seconds for the competitor.
Epic Games has paid special attention to the Linux community. The company is working on adapting the Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) anti-cheat system and is collaborating with developers of various distributions. This will allow Fortnite and other EAC-supported games to be officially ported to Linux in the future via a new launcher.
Anyone can try out the preview version , but Epic Games advises developers and esports players to stay on the stable client for now.
The previous Epic Games launcher was repeatedly criticized by users for its slow performance, high resource consumption, and delays in loading store pages.
