Without any flashy marketing campaigns or social media fanfare, Valve rolled out a routine Steam Client update containing a very simple line in the patch notes: “Improved Steam Client startup performance.”
My “Hello, World!” script boots approximately 18000x faster than the Epic launcher.
The difference in features between the two is about the same as it is between Steam and the Epic launcher.
Technically correct, practically wrong, they are both gaming store bloat apps but steam is a steaming (!) pile of a webshite that takes longer to load than some games (for me at least) and uses 700mb of ram/vram.
As Steam has been extremely slow to launch for quite some time now, anybody want to take a stab at why it took an Epic Games taunt for them to take care of it?
Has it? I never noticed. It always been fast for me. 2 seconds is too long?
Maybe it’s because I’m opted into the beta, so I’m always downloading updates. But it always takes a couple of minutes to launch from scratch for me and my gaming PC is no slouch.
But once I launch it, I leave it up, I never close it, so it’s never just running in the background waiting for me to pop it up again.
From what others said, this has been in the beta. Epic tried to beat this release just to be able to technically say they were faster for a day.
Ah. So there you go. And it will go down in history written in stone and people will still be talking about it 100 years from now
EGS loads faster because there’s fewer features to load.
Who the fuck cares if the fast launcher is a piece of crap with a fraction of features needed for a good library and storefront?
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/710037059469839721
The actual update post from Valve. Why is it not linked in the article? The notes are huge, with many things improved. Off course one of the improvements would probably lead to better loading times. This isn’t a response to Epic Games, this is a main update developed way before.
Honestly, that makes it even better to me. Here’s Epic bragging about beating Steam in some way meanwhile Valve’s like “here’s a little something we’ve been working on for a while. No biggy.”
Steam stays winning
And to add to that this was already part of the Beta update from 9. September
Both of them are using a form of embedded Chromium to display the store, no? Is this really worth competing about then? xD
The Starcraft launcher goes under 1 second on a pentium 1, there.
I had to work with embedded chromium once. It’s how I became a watcher on bug #126, which took 9 years to resolve. 9 years for “what happens when I click a link in embedded chromium” 🍿🤓
Why wouldn’t you just set the link to launch the user’s browser, instead of expecting Chromium to implement special case behavior?
That is the bug:
What is the expected result?
Open the link target in default browser, leaving SSB window on original site, thereby preserving desktop application illusion.
What happens instead?
Link opens in current window.
Tim Sweeny: “Is there anything we are better at than steam? Literally anything? I will take anything we can market, no matter how pathetic and desperate it seems.”
Going forward we optimize for “restore from system tray” time. That’ll be a game changer.
Unreal is better than Source.
In terms of graphical features, sure, probably. In my (admittedly limited) experience Source games tend to have much better performance and modding, which I find much more important.
Yeah, while the graphics capabilities of Unreal are about a decade ahead with dynamic occlusion culling, hyperrealistic lighting, a very very large set of libraries of 4k and 8k textures, and volumetrics…
the downside is that Unreal Engine is difficult to optimize and harder to use with low level programming.
I expect things to get much worse as they continue to slop-ify. They already advertised an “AI-assisted” build when they published the comparison.
That’s up to developers that use it. Though I haven’t much experience with Valve’s profiling tools it being closed source makes it harder for devs that want to rewrite any given feature
Yeah but the performance is mostly due to its age. It’s much more limited in what you can do. BSPs are great for efficiency, but they’re a huge pain to work with when creating a map. Unreal is leagues better to work with in just about every way.
The licensing for source is better than unreal. Its only stipend it has to be published on steam. (Which you’re most likely to do anyway) while unreal requires 5% royalities over 1mil gross revenue (outside of epic store, which lets be real… wont account for much)
FWIW Steam takes a 30% cut from sales
And for that cut they provide hosting, cloud saves, promotion, distribution, community support, workshop availability, DLC handling, and a store page. The cut is also much less than what larger publishing companies charge for less service. Self publishing is very feasible on Steam.
Until Unreal is completely sloppified
Then it’ll live up to the name!
He was recently quoted in an article saying that in order to be successful, games need to launch on the Steam platform.
The Epic store shopping cart died for this.
Wait it doesn’t even have a shopping cart
It doesn’t have any “advanced e-commerce features” yet sorry
As pathetic as Epic is, this is a strong demonstration of why monopolies are bad and competition is needed.
Its not a random update in response to Epic.
The September 9 beta branch mentioned improved start up time.
Steam quietly improves itself without making big announcements calling out other companies to try to get attention. Its why it has been working on stuff like Proton, steamos, and hardware.
This isn’t a case of competition though; Valve didn’t slip in a last second speedup to get back at Epic, the patch had already been built and tested and just happened to come out a day after Epic’s did.
I’m with you on this. I’ve been rather annoyed with watching steam constantly needing to re-download 500 MB of whatever the hell randomly and I run a lot of computers that restart often (benchmarking shitty PCS is kind of a hobby for me).
I’m glad someone called them out and I’m glad that they responded by improving their software and in record time packing it into the next regular release.
This whole thing looks like the market acting like it should when there is at least a tiny modicum of competition. Just wish the competition was healthier and more vibrant. And less Epic.
The Steam update has been available in the beta client for over a month. This wasn’t a response, they had already done it.
shrug I still love Steam, and I still love that anyone is trying to keep 'em honest.
I generally run mainline client, so I’m glad they decided to release the update to us non-Beta users.
Recently, Epic Games decided to tackle that reputation head-on by unveiling a preview version of its rebuilt Epic Games Launcher V2, which the company proudly noted was developed with heavy AI assistance. Basically, a decade of working on it themselves, no luck, but they got the AI vibes to help and it did a better job… Not the brag they seem to think it is, but let’s roll with it for now.
Damn, do you need something for that burn?
Huh, I guess competition is good for motivating improvement. Even when you’re competing against the kid that eats paste.
Patch notes: “we didn’t think anyone really gave a shit, but fuck epic”
It didn’t really bother me before, but it has been kind of slow to start for a long time. Bad enough for me to notice that’s it’s slow, but not bad enough to feel the need to complain about it.
Now it only takes about 6 seconds for me which is perfectly fine. As someone who only runs Steam when I’m about to play a game through it, it’s a very noticeable improvement!
I let it run constantly and never really noticed the load time. Good to hear it is so quick now!
Epic: I Feel Bad For You
Valve: I Don’t Think About You At All
I open steam exactly once, then never again until I restart my computer. Why would this even matter.
Because not everyone is you?
Also devices like steam deck and steam machine.
I don’t know but Steam (or any other app) stealing focus was a really big pet peeve of mine. Glad it’s allegedly fixed.
For you it wouldn’t really matter much. It is a big improvement and very much noticeable, but it matters much more for people like me that only runs Steam when I’m about to play a game through it which can happen several times a day.
Some people get stuck on performance numbers that don’t matter. Like Linux users that say they want 5second boot time instead of 8. Why? Or a sorts car owner that never does track days but likes to tell you their car can do 240km/h…when we have 120km/h road limits.
I had to wait an hour to boot on Windows 10 LTSC. Not the first machine I owned with that problem, either.
File system check?
Ran it regularly before and after the scheduled update every three months. Also ran a scheduled CHKDSK and DISM. Basically took a full day for routine updates. Cleared temporary files and unused AppData. Defragmented. I also frequently flushed DNS cache.
The fact that it’s not an issue with any individual hardware should have tipped you off that it’s not an “error” but just the way Windows is. You can find unresolved forums posts about this kind of issue going back to the early days of Windows 7 if you search.
If anybody is stupid enough to still use windows this is my advice: Enable the Hibernate option. It saves the RAM to disk and then resumes from there on startup, skipping any issues.
I actually suspect it started on the LTSC copy specifically after the Windows Store was installed, which cannot be undone.
Boot times are such a arbitrary performance statistic. My Nobara machine boots quite fast, but i had to put a 30s timeout for my array of hard drives in the fstab to make sure they get mounted correctly. That’s not the fault of the OS, it’s a hardware limitation that can’t really be worked around at all.
Or a sorts car owner that never does track days but likes to tell you their car can do 240km/h…when we have 120km/h road limits.
Yeah, but to be fair that V10 Lamborghini Huracán can get up to that speed limit much more quickly than my budget-sports-car Scion tC can. Besides, how are we supposed to know how small their penis is unless they rev their engine up so loud it hurts everyone’s ears?
You guys are restarting your computers?
Power bill too high. It’s easy to turn it off when 8 go to bed.
My windows work laptop (company provided it and won’t let me install linux for “safety reasons”; same reasons why they ask me to use chrome instead of firefox, btw): hey, so I know you’re right now working but I just downloaded an update and you know what? I’m restarting now.
Public relations, pride, vengeance?
Companies often take actions which don’t directly improve the product for customers but instead offer benefits to the company. Typing that out in 2026 is… It’s nice that it isn’t pure enshittification for once.
Valid. I think a lot of people do this. I may be an outlier, I don’t like having launchers open unless I need them open, so I close them whenever I’m done gaming.
I actually kinda hate that steam is always running.
I get the reasons why, but I would rather just have like a steam updater daemon than the full app running, and would also prefer that Steam starts quickly unless you catch it during the daemon’s start up.
The other use case is for HTPC I do not like Big Picture mode as my “home” experience. If you open Steam with game scope it goes into big picture automatically, so it’s designed for Steam Machine experiences and not HTPC. The new screensaver feature (which is in beta, so should improve) uses a lot of GPU and polls CPU frequently, so it’s actually a bit annoying to have running. I would rather use a more native launcher than the Big Picture mode experience, so you end up having to watch the opening animation frequently to mask the slow startup.
Again, this is pretty mild, and I don’t think even PS5 provides a large improvement.
Have you tried small mode? It’s a built-in option.
https://www.howtogeek.com/694531/how-to-reduce-steams-ram-usage-from-400-mb-to-60-mb/
https://www.xbitlabs.com/blog/mini-steam/
(The instructions are Windows-centric, but the process is pretty much the same on Linux I think. You can figure it out)
TIL, no I haven’t tried it, and I’ll have to see how it works out
If I can run that as a background thing and open games directly it would be a nice experience
I haven’t really messed with it, only tried it once to see if the command worked and it did
I’m pretty sure this no longer works. The minigameslist is no longer available and almost all components are implemented using CEF
Edit: wait wait wait is small mode back??
Edit 2: apparently it was never gone and I’m just stupid lol
Letting arbitrarily executing code run persistently is a security/privacy risk, for those who care.
I trust steam more, but I hate that discord does this stuff.
Also its probably bug territory, but steam always fucking opens big picture if you press the home button any time its running with a controller, even in the background.
Like I get they probably focused on steam deck UX for their incredibly helpful push to linux, but the dev in me can’t help but be pissed off they implemented it so lazily.
You can turn off steam using a certain controller type (or all) but by default it takes them over. It can cause problems with some software, and apparently doesn’t leave controllers in the same state afterwards.
Works well for me though, the only time I use controllers is for steam games and it handles all the mapping/customization pretty well
You never boot your computer until you reboot it either, yet if it took 10+ minutes to boot like a PC would many years ago, you’d complain.
More performance is almost always more better, unless you’re on embedded devices where binary sizes matter, but for us on desktops with comparatively abundant resources, why moan about a free improvement?
It depends if it’s a free improvement or not. If this improved time to open the window at the cost of deferring loading some important functionality it might be a net loss for example
Thankfully, the only company that I believe has ever made an attempt to make something load faster by making it functionally worse is Microsoft with Windows Fast-Startup.
“Ah yes, I know how to make their OS load faster… We’ll just never shut it down!” - That’s Microsoft-tier intelligence right there.
No, I do not believe that Valve would make their storefront worse in any sense just to beat Epic Games; they frankly couldn’t give less of a shit, because they know that the EGL is not competition.
Somebody thought they Kobayashi Maru’d performance optimization
if you notice a 5ms delay in steam bootup times it might mean there’s a virus
