"Our launcher sucks" — Epic Games Store boss on the state of the service and plans for improvement

"Our Launcher Sucks" — Epic Games Store Boss on the Service's State and Improvement Plans

Epic Games Store Vice President Steven Allison sharply criticized the state of the launcher and promised major changes this year. In an interview with Eurogamer, he bluntly admitted: the client is slow and has long annoyed users, and Epic has delayed working on player convenience for far too long.

The conversation was prompted by the annual Epic Games Store report. The company discussed growth in spending on third-party games while simultaneously confirming a decline in playtime for Fortnite. However, Epic's main focus was not on the numbers, but on the store's future. According to Allison, in 2025 the team finally shifted its focus from developer tools to user convenience.

Allison named the Epic Games Store launcher's speed as its main problem. The client constantly contacts the server with every click, causing the interface to "think" for several seconds. Epic began restructuring the architecture in November 2025 and has already "ripped out the old guts to put in new ones." According to Allison, the first results should be noticeable to players in May or June, and Epic's official plans mention "this summer."

In addition to improving speed, Epic plans to add social features that the store has long lacked. The service will get avatars, user profiles, private messages, and cross-platform text chat. Voice chat support will launch in May. In the fall, the company will launch a unified library for PC and mobile devices, update game collection management, and introduce regional storefronts. Separately, Epic is preparing to release the store on iOS in Japan in March and in Brazil in June.

The Eurogamer journalist asked Allison a very reasonable question — why a company with such vast resources dragged its feet for so long on basic store features. According to the Epic boss, it's due to the complexity of the model itself. The Epic Games Store was originally built as a "two-sided marketplace," and that turned out to be much harder than expected at the start.

The store gained an audience very quickly — about 30 million users in the first 14 months. In that situation, Epic decided to focus on attracting publishers and developers. The company needed to simplify their entry into the ecosystem and create convenient tools so developers wouldn't have to handle everything manually. Free giveaways helped attract players and balance the interests of both sides.

Allison also reminded that the store was launched as a tool to pressure the market. Epic wanted to offer developers better terms — an 88/12 revenue split instead of the usual 70/30 on Steam. This goal remained a priority for a long time, while user features took a back seat.

Now the priorities have changed. Epic is directing most of its efforts toward player features and isn't arguing with the criticism. Allison acknowledged that part of the audience still views the company very negatively.

All that criticism is fair [criticism from the r/fuckepic subreddit]. There are people who feel exactly that way about us, and we respect that. But we know: when these features arrive, players will be happy, we just need to get it done.

I hope that in a year or two, we won't be having this conversation anymore. Cross-platform capabilities are cool, and the social features might even be better than anyone else's. The goal for that timeframe is for Epic to no longer look like it's lagging behind in terms of expected features.

We're trying to address all the major and fair complaints. We just need to sit down and do the work.