Epic Games Store exec admits ‘the launcher sucks’, says improvements are on the way

The Epic Games Store’s launcher “sucks” and improvements are coming, an exec has conceded.

In an interview with Eurogamer, Epic Game Store vice president and general manager Steven Allison was asked about the player’s experience navigating the store.

Allison replied that the company is focused on improving the store and its software launcher, pointing to its slow speeds as one of the main problems it’s working on.

“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 explained.

“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 says work on improving this started late last year and involves “pulling the guts out [and] putting new guts in”, with improved speed set to come around May or June.

“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,” he said.

Earlier this week Epic stated that it was “in the process of rebuilding the underlying architecture of the Epic Games Store Launcher” and would be shipping improvements in the summer.

“To create a better social experience for players, we’re creating community spaces in the Epic Games Store and enhancing cross-platform text chat with features like avatars, player profiles, and private messaging,” it added.

“These social capabilities will be extended to Epic Online Services, opening up text chat for other developers to include in their games later this year. In Q2, we will add voice chat and game-independent parties to our social framework.”