TL;DR: Epic Games recently confirmed that it plans to launch a major overhaul of its PC games launcher in May or June. Following a positive year-end 2025 report, the company admitted that the client is inferior to Steam in a series of frank interviews with media outlets. Along with a faster launcher, Epic plans to introduce new social features and tie Fortnite content to game pre-orders.
Steven Allison, the Epic Games Store's vice president and general manager, conceded that the launcher boots and responds to user input more sluggishly than Steam. To address complaints that have persisted for years, the company is completely rebuilding the client's backend. "We're ripping the guts out of the Epic Games launcher, entirely – well, mostly entirely – and replacing it," he told Polygon.
Allison admitted that the Epic Games Store launcher currently contacts the company's servers whenever users click or move the mouse cursor, often causing lag measured in seconds. It also consumes significantly more system resources than Steam. "We have a lot of things we need to fix," he stated in an interview with Eurogamer.
The general manager explained that Epic has been preoccupied with improving developer tools to attract more games to the platform over the past several years. "It isn't that we ignored it," Allison said, "but we had to get out of the super manual onboarding of important titles. We had to build the tools for self-publishing, and that took us, like, almost three years. It was a major focus of our engineering."
However, Epic recently pivoted to reworking the player-facing experience, as work on the overhaul began around November. In the summer, the company hopes to have a client that loads much quicker. "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."
Epic also plans to catch up to Steam's social features. During the first half of this year, the company will introduce private messaging, voice chat, game-independent parties, player profiles, avatars, and a beta feature that resembles asynchronous forum posting.
Furthermore, games from Capcom, miHoYo, Pearl Abyss, S-Game, MintRocket, Kakao Games, and other publishers will begin offering Fortnite cosmetics with pre-orders of their games. Allison suggested that Resident Evil Requiem, scheduled to launch on February 27, will be an early example. Meanwhile, regional storefronts with localized discovery will allow publishers to target specific territories. Cross-platform PC and mobile libraries are also planned for this fall.
Epic has struggled to convince customers to spend money on games other than Fortnite. Comparing the company's annual reports since 2019 reveals that, as millions of users made accounts to claim free games, the number of customers paying for third-party titles had barely budged by 2024.
The company's latest report shows that it reversed this trend in 2025, bringing third-party game spending to an unprecedented $400 million. Epic also increased its client's total user base to 317 million, but last year's drop in total gameplay hours likely indicates a notable decline in Fortnite playtime.
While Allison claimed that Epic never planned to dethrone Steam, which commands around 90 percent of the PC gaming market share, the company hopes to reach between 30 and 40 percent in five years. "I don't think the battle has been lost at all," he said.