Epic Games has detailed upcoming changes to its store and game launcher.
During a presentation at Unreal Fest where the company discussed upcoming plans for the Epic Games Store, it explained in detail what its priorities were for the next 12 months to overhaul the store and game launcher.
In slideshow images taken by X user LuKaOnIndeed and shared on Reddit, Epic split its priorities into three timeframes, with the most imminent changes including “storefront rearchitecture” and a private beta of an Epic Games Launcher version 2, along with other quality of life improvements like in-store patch notes, cross-region gifting and “chunked installation” for Fortnite.
After these tasks, Epic will move onto to a public release of the Epic Games Launcher V2, as well as improving the Epic Games Store’s design and UX, including the addition of player profiles and avatars, user-written reviews and improvements to search.
Finally, tasks planned for further in the future include a multi-platform store – potentially referring to the presence of an Epic Games Store on Xbox‘s Project Helix – as well as universal controller support and a storefront redesign.
The company then went into specifics, but it was its comments on the Epic Games Launcher that were perhaps the most crucial, with a slide claiming: “Every developer in this room and every player we have has experience challenges with the current launcher – it’s time for a change.”
It also claimed that the upcoming version 2 of the Epic Games Launcher will have a cold start that will be five times faster on average.
This isn’t the first time Epic has addressed the issues players face with its game launcher. Back in February, Epic Games Store vice president and general manager Steven Allison said the launcher “sucks” and promised improvements were coming.
“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 told Eurogamer at the time. “And the big rocks are – the launcher sucks. Let’s call it what it is.
“It’s really slow. It makes calls to our back-end services to refresh every time you click around, and depending on your connection, you’ll have to wait a couple seconds. And that just doesn’t feel good, especially when people are comparing and contrasting and dual using one that doesn’t do that.”
Allison said that work on improving this started late last year and involves “pulling the guts out [and] putting new guts in”, adding: “It should start to feel good, be faster and people [should] be like, ‘holy shit. It doesn’t suck so much’, and that will be a win for us.”
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