Epic says I can change baby, I promise, as it returns for its now-annual tradition of admitting its launcher ‘sucks’

If you’re anything like me, your Epic Games Store account is a kind of Library of Alexandria of free-but-unplayed games. Every so often you open the site, add whatever the current free game is to your collection, then never, ever, ever play them. Perhaps some day a long winter will come, and we’ll all sit down and chew through our collections like they’re so many acorns in our cheeks.

For now, though: the Epic launcher is bad. It’s just not a good launcher—it’s slow, bloated, and continually forgets who you are. That’s not just me saying that, it’s Epic. Last year, Epic head honcho Tim Sweeney straight-up said the launcher was “clunky,” and now EGS vice president and general manager Steven Allison has told Eurogamer that “the launcher sucks. Let’s call it what it is. It’s really slow.”

Allison says there are “a lot of things we need to fix. We have needed to fix them for years. We’ve been really focused on developer tooling and all the things we do there. But last year, we finally started to point more of our resources towards player experience stuff.”

Up to now, the EGS has been making “calls to our back-end services to refresh every time you click around,” explained Allison, which is why you might experience lag on slower connections. Apparently, that’s all set to change.

In essence, Allison says Epic’s devs are hard at work stripping out the EGS’ innards and putting in new, faster innards. “We’re basically pulling the guts out, putting new guts in… It should start to feel good, be faster and people be like, ‘Holy shit. It doesn’t suck so much.’ And that will be a win for us.” The EGS team is also working on adding community spaces to the storefront. To be frank, the absence of anything resembling the notoriously toxic Steam forums has been one of the things in EGS’ favour so far as I’m concerned, but I guess others disagree. Anyway, small, achievable goals.

(Image credit: Epic Games)

Which, okay, sure. It’s nice when corporations acknowledge reality—it’s harder for them than it perhaps should be—but let’s bear in mind that Sweeney was copping to the EGS’ clunkiness almost a full year ago and the store itself has been available since 2018. At no point in that long tenure has it been good. Rather than shuffling out once a year to have the bosses shamefacedly take their lumps for how bad it is, it’d be preferable for it to just stop being bad.

Hey, that’s what Allison promises, and that sounds great, but I also won’t be paralysed with shock if you and I meet here again next year when some other exec performs the shame ritual.

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