"Every developer in this room and every player we have has experienced challenges with the current launcher," reads one slide from Epic's Unreal Fest presentation in Chicago. "It's time for a change."
That's a rare moment of public self-criticism from a major platform holder, and it comes attached to one of the most substantial roadmaps the Epic Games Store has ever put forward. Presented at Unreal Fest Chicago this week, the plan outlines a ground-up rebuild of the EGS launcher targeting a five-times faster cold start, plus a long list of features that PC gamers have been asking for since the store launched back in 2018.
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The launcher rebuild that actually matters
The headline number is hard to ignore: 5x faster boot times. For anyone who has watched the current EGS launcher crawl to life before a session, that promise alone is enough to get attention. Epic is calling this a "ground-up rebuild," which suggests the performance gains aren't coming from surface-level tweaks but from rearchitecting how the launcher loads at its core.
No specific release date is attached to the rebuild yet, but it's listed as an "up first" priority, meaning it sits closer to the front of the queue than the longer-term wishlist items.
User reviews and player profiles finally arrive
Here's the thing: the absence of user reviews has been one of the most persistent criticisms of the Epic Games Store since day one. Steam's review system, for all its quirks, gives buyers a fast gut-check before they spend money. EGS has never had that, and it's pushed plenty of PC gamers back to Valve's platform by default.
The roadmap places user-written reviews in the "up next" category alongside player profiles and avatars. These aren't confirmed launch-ready features, but their presence on the official roadmap signals that Epic is treating them as genuine near-term targets rather than vague aspirations.
What's landing sooner: the "up first" list
The features flagged as closest to shipping cover a solid mix of quality-of-life improvements for both players and developers:
- Fortnite chunked installation (download only what you need to play)
- Third-party patch notes displayed directly in the store
- Pre-registration for free-to-play games
- Storefront rearchitecture (the structural backbone of the redesign)
- Library management improvements
Third-party patch notes is a quietly significant addition. Right now, players using EGS often have no idea what changed in an update unless they hunt down the developer's own channels. Surfacing that information inside the launcher closes a gap that Steam filled years ago.
The longer view: publisher coupons and search
Slotted into the "up next" tier alongside reviews are publisher-funded coupons and search improvements. The coupon system mirrors something Epic has run manually through its own promotions, but moving that capability to publishers directly could mean more frequent discounts driven by the developers themselves rather than Epic's marketing calendar.
Search improvements might sound unglamorous, but anyone who has tried to find a specific game on EGS knows the current system leaves a lot to be desired. Getting that right is table stakes for a store competing with Steam's mature discovery tools.
Eight years in, and the gap is still real
The Epic Games Store launched in December 2018 with Tim Sweeney pitching it as a developer-friendly alternative to Steam, built on the back of Fortnite's massive revenue. The economics were genuinely better for developers: an 88/12 revenue split compared to Steam's 70/30. But features that players expected from day one, things like a shopping cart, user reviews, and a functional search, took years to arrive or still haven't.
Court documents from 2023 confirmed the store had not turned a profit by that point, and the company had burned through hundreds of millions on exclusivity deals in the years prior. The roadmap announced this week reads less like a victory lap and more like an acknowledgment that the platform needs to earn its place in players' libraries through execution, not just economics.
If the launcher rebuild delivers on its 5x performance promise and user reviews ship without the kind of delays that have plagued EGS features before, this could be a genuinely meaningful moment for the platform. If you're optimizing your PC setup in the meantime, the Fortnite FPS and settings guide covers how to squeeze better performance out of your system regardless of which launcher you're running through. For more across the gaming world, the gaming guides hub has you covered while Epic's updates roll out over the coming months.
Epic hasn't confirmed a timeline for when the rebuilt launcher goes live. The Unreal Fest slides are the clearest public signal yet that the rollout is actively in progress, and the next few months will show whether these promises hold.
