Epic Games has admitted its PC launcher needs major work, promising sweeping performance upgrades and long-requested social features as part of a broader overhaul of the Epic Games ecosystem.
The comments arrived alongside the company’s annual stats release for the Epic Games Store, which showed a surge in third-party spending and a decline in playtime for Fortnite. At the same time, Epic outlined plans to dramatically speed up the launcher, add new community tools, and introduce a shared library across PC and mobile.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Epic Games Store vice president and general manager Steven Allison was blunt about the current state of the software.
Epic admits launcher problems and promises faster performance
“We got a lot of stuff out the door last year, and this year is going to be probably the best year for that stuff on the ‘big rocks,’” Allison said. “And the big rocks are: the launcher sucks. Let’s call it what it is. It’s really slow.”
He explained that the launcher repeatedly calls Epic’s backend services as users navigate menus, creating noticeable delays depending on connection quality. “That just doesn’t feel good, especially when people are comparing and contrasting and dual-using one that doesn’t do that,” he added, referring to rival platforms such as Steam.
According to Allison, Epic began rebuilding the launcher’s underlying architecture in November 2025 and expects the speed improvements to roll out around May or June, with the company’s official release window set for summer.
“It should start to feel good, be faster, and people be like, ‘Holy sh*t. It doesn’t suck so much.’ And that will be a win for us,” he said.
Beyond raw performance, Epic is also targeting features that have long been missing from its storefront. Allison acknowledged that the platform currently lacks the social framework found on competitors.
As part of that push, Epic plans to introduce community spaces, player avatars, profiles, private messaging, cross-platform text chat, voice chat, and game-independent parties beginning in Q2, with Allison saying May is the current target. A cross-platform library is scheduled for autumn, alongside new library management tools, region-specific storefronts, and launches of the store on iOS in Japan in March and Brazil in June.
Epic is also preparing to test forum-style features later this year, an addition Allison described as “a kind of forum-type experience.”
When asked why these player-facing tools have taken so long to arrive, Allison pointed to the complexity of launching a large two-sided marketplace and the company’s early focus on developer systems.
He said Epic prioritized building self-publishing tools and streamlining onboarding for studios, a process that took nearly three years of engineering work, while also pushing its 88 percent revenue share for developers.
“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.”
At the same time, Allison acknowledged the criticism the store has faced from players, including vocal detractors on social media.
“The criticism is all fair,” he said, adding that Epic is now spending the majority of its engineering resources on player-facing features.
“We’re trying to attack all the big buckets of things that are fair criticisms, and we have to do the work. We just have to do the work.”
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