I used to think vibe coding would get us slow Electron apps but now we got speed wars between game launchers. I hope this comes for all types of software.
With that said, I tested it right now and Steam takes about 2 seconds to restore from tray and 10-15 for cold boot. The new Epic launcher is around 0.5 and 5 like the article mentioned. Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something.
It's nice but a low bar. Steam pioneered crappy Chrome-based desktop apps before Electron existed, which is also why it's so hard to run Steam in Wine. It has a longer startup and shutdown process (they even call it that) than my entire OS.
Epic, EA, etc then made their own similar launchers. Of course all of them also want to launch when Windows boots, update constantly, and not close when you press close.
I think these days it's easier to run Steam in Wine than it is to run Wine in the first place. If you're running a commercial packaging of Wine for gaming, both things are trivial.
(Successfully running Windows games is its own issue: I think "Steam Deck" compatibility badging is a pretty reliable tell for Linux gaming, but on a Mac, having the game be playable is a gamble on install and again with every patch.)
I would go one step farther - if you're vibe coding, skip Tauri altogether. I've been on-and-off vibecoding a GitKraken replacement using egui instead, and the memory footprint is very low. Otherwise can't tell the difference, as I'm not reading the code either way.
I actually think that vibe coding lends itself well to stuff with really strict type systems. When you use Claude Code, it basically works on a loop until it gets something "right". A type system allows for part of the "right" criteria to be baked into the compilation, giving a hard block if it doesn't at least pass that.
I've had reasonably good luck having Claude generate Rust code that performs well.
The real reason rewrites to fix tech debt used to fail was that it took too long to get to feature partity & the goal posts moved constantly while you were on the rewrite team.
The sunk cost of existing code is no longer considered in a rewrite.
Maybe it was hard to write in the first place, but it is not hard to rewrite anymore, as long you've got decent tests.
i don't care how fast it is beyond a certain point. What is more shocking is all the bugs that vibe coding landed epic. I can't imagine shipping software at this scale in this state.
I really hope this comes true. I'd love Electron-free versions of Discord and Teams. I've been building a native Rust/GPUI desktop app, and the difference in startup and memory is huge.
Counter-intuitively (or intuitively if you’re inside the industry), slow Electron apps became the norm because of how much developers cost. Now that AI can step in with parallel expertise at scale, I suspect we’ll have all sorts of optimization races.
On the other hand, OpenAI has recently successfully ported the abysmal performance of ChatGPT/Codex on macOS to the web (at least in Firefox) with no end in sight…
Prioritization still matters. Agents will happily optimize your app for performance, but at least current ones seem like you need to explicitly tell them.
The new version of Epic is based on Tauri. Also written in JS and probably React (haven't decompiled it yet) but the web runtime is part of Windows instead of shipped with the app so it takes less disk space and RAM. And you can write perf sensitive code in Rust for even more speedup.
Interesting, I didn't know they moved to a Chromium based desktop application. But honestly, I don't feel like there's any performance issues with the steam desktop client (I'm running it on Fedora, but I'm assuming performance is relatively similar on different platforms).
I'd imagine one can now focus on creating a client for a single OS and having the AI do the porting to others as it would essentially be a translation.
Perhaps it will bring back native apps because supporting other platforms is less laborious.
Hopefully LLM models and harnesses improve to where Chromium or Electron apps can be more trivially converted to native apps. You're paying for tokens for downstream compute efficiency across the user base.
They already are. I asked opus 5.5 to plan out and begin building a swift version of my electron notes app, using a similar architecture / feature set. I hut enter and honestly forgot about it. 2 hours later im reading slack while making my next round of coffee, and my session is interrupted by a native app opening on my phone (the model installed it for me to test). It.... has 2/3 of the features already and looks awesome, holy crap. It skipped my suggestion to use the Lexical (web) editor and is.... using. platform native one.
time will tell if it can make it the way i like but.... it can definitely get far. Used 40% of my session limits on my $20/mo sub.
I wonder what best practices here look like at this point. In my world, we've moved past skills for something like this, having porting helper/validator/etc things be harness level is measurably better than what skills look like right now. The open plugin spec is certainly an improvement (namely in packaging and distribution)- but, really you'd be leaving perf on the table if you were not to tune your harness. I wonder if something like dsh, pi, or other extensible (coding) harnesses have something like a concept of "harness as an extension".
It’s just that the vibe coded stuff has so many assumptions baked in, that you will be constantly surprised about the behaviors your slopped codebase has. Doesn’t matter for small tools, where you’ll be delighted that clicking that one label copies it to your clipboard - nice one, Claude, that’s delightful!
It’s less nice when your web app launches that other service only when the other Tailscale node is up, because the agent interpreted your prompt as a hard access rule.
It's because no matter how 'good' the AI output is, "vibe coding" is strongly associated with "completely unreviewed and untested". LLMs have brought the skill floor straight through the ground and into the depths of hell, so people are doubly cautious with it because there's a very good chance with any vibe coded app that there's not a single person in the world that truly understands what it actually does just behind the scenes. It could be completely fine, or it could be breaking your system or uploading your sensitive data somewhere because the vibe coder provided flawed instructions or the LLM decided to make an unexpected 'optimization'. Wanna roll the dice and find out which one it is?
I'm reserving "vibe coding" in my head for "the programming style where you just prompt your way around without even looking at the code and only caring if your happy path works".
I have a couple of nice "vibe coded" apps I would never dream of releasing because I'm not interested in the QA, more than anything else. The problem is the other people who are not quite so considerate and think that what they tossed out in 15 minutes is of interest to the rest of the world. The value of a software package release now is more in the QA than the code.
Yeah I'm really impressed by what Opus 5.5 can manage.
I feel like human code is on a wide quality spectrum. The best human code is way better than what Opus 5.5 can do. But the average code, I'm not so sure.
Trust me I know what it's like. I do a lot of it. Even with Opus you still have to guide it aggressively or your codebase turns to slop.
An experienced dev with Claude is better than either of them alone but you can't just point your agent at a repo and expect good results. And when people talk about vibe coding that's usually what they mean.
> People still talk about "Vibe coding" or implying "vibe coded" stuff is poor quality
Yes they do. Because it is. Anyone who cares about the quality of their product is, at minimum, carefully reviewing the output from an LLM to make sure it didn't sneak in anything crazy. More likely they are writing a lot of code by hand, because that is faster than reviewing and correcting the LLM code. Competent developers do not just hand it off and say "the AI is really good so I can trust what it put out".
> Epic may have “vibe coded” a faster client, but Valve proved that targeted optimization on a decades-old ecosystem can still beat out AI speedruns.
Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI.
I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
Once I had a good benchmark script, Opus 4.8 or whatever made my terminal app faster with less memory than ghostty and kitty. It's not even interesting.
> I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
This is probably the saddest comment I've read on HN. It really shows the state of this place and how far into psychosis the comments have fallen.
every comment mentioning "ai psychosis" is an amazing caricature. people whining about original thoughts repeating the same resident tropes over and over again. basically just throwing out insults. try that for sad.
same people usually who'd be livid about misusing mental health status labels, and torturing language in general. but it's okay, as it is for a noble purpose: insulting people whose opinion you currently feel sufficiently uppity and righteous about. that will raise the bar!
the "last bastions of human values" demonstrating the absolute bottom of the barrel human behavior and intellect. good bit worse than sad, really.
> The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
The dark forest hypothesis is that we can't find any alien life because it's dangerous to broadcast your existence and location to competitors. So rational thing for every alien civilian to do (and arguably for us) is to keep quiet.
It's "sort of" a dark forest problem because admitting you're using AI is socially risky. Indeed, this entire thread is built on the idea that Epic's lazy use of AI has been bested by the savvy & righteous programmers at Valve[1].
So people who think AI is actually a really useful tool and that using it to make your project better will imagine that everyone who makes things better today uses AI at least a little, and assumes they don't talk about it because they don't want to get yelled at. Meanwhile, if you think AI does bad work (or is often used badly) you can ascribe bad software to bad uses of the tool. We can never know for sure because people don't talk about it.
[1] I happen to agree with this dichotomy but that belief precedes AI
Yeah exactly, Valve engineers probably just told AI to make it faster.
Your "dark forest" analogy sounds reasonable but Epic's outright admission of "vibe coding" is a bit of a footgun considering how rabidly anti-AI the folks on sites like Reddit are. If they had just been like, "it's faster and supports Linux" they would be the darling of the internet.
Epic Games wants to make an "AI-first" game, so they need to push "vibe coding" onto the gaming audiences to get them to accept it before they lay off people and ask $69 for a game where the art is made by an AI model.
I know a few very serious and well compensated programmers with decades of experience. These people work on prominent open source projects, climate modelling, linear programming, large org enginneering. Every single one of them uses LLMs heavily and swears by the increased productivity of using them.
I find the opposite. A good engineer would tell the agent the "know what they know they're doing" part. Let the AI take that direction and context, let it implement/test it 100x faster than a human can by hand, the engineer come back and confirm AI did the job about the same way as they would have wanted it to be done themselves.
> for an engineer who knows what he's doing, LLMs are of very limited use
LLMs are very good at code analysis, and finding both security issues and optimization opportunities. Yes, even in code written by highly experienced human engineers. Failing to have an LLM look for places where your code could be optimized is, IMHO, indefensible. It's like shipping your binaries compiled at -O0 - deliberately choosing to waste your users' time and hardware resources because you couldn't be bothered to properly configure and run a tool.
All I can think with this whole situation is how much time is wasted by people getting angry and defensive on behalf of a Valve. It's almost like people have a parasocial relationship with the application itself.
That's not even getting to some of the "missing" features.
No Community marketplace for in-game items
No Direct player-to-player item trading
No Digital trading cards, levelling, and points shop
I hope more application developers "forget" to add these features.
People have wasted their time defending their platform's "honour" for decades. It used to be Sega vs Nintendo. Then it was PlayStation vs XBox. Now it's Steam vs EGS.
Anyway, what are useful features of Steam:
- their dedication to getting Windows games running on Linux (to see off the existential threat Microsoft poses to them, but nonetheless greatly appreciated)
- community forums / screenshots / artwork / guides etc. for every product. Very useful if the game vendor doesn't have its own, and most game vendors don't
- that Steam Sales encourage vendors to offer games at much more reasonable prices (e.g. a few pounds/dollars/etc.) for what is effectively a license, revocable at any time, not a real purchase. £60? Ha ha fuck off, I'm waiting for the sale when it's £5
- also, as far as I've seen, every game distributed can still be downloaded today. People may complain that publishers update a title e.g. to remove licensed music 10 years later... but you can still download the old version with some trickery. And I've never seen Steam actively remove downloads for existing customers, I've only seen games removed from the store so no future customers
- pirates have found that most games, if their only DRM is Steamworks, are incredibly easy to crack. I am very glad Steam has convinced most publishers to use that alone and nothing worse, and I curse publishers who insist on their own DRM, their own launcher, etc. If Valve goes tits-up, I have a lot of confidence most of peoples libraries will still be playable with a little bit of cracking.
There are other useful features, even if Valve is getting rich and fat off selling gambling and day-trading to teenagers.
I think the "fanboyism" of Steam is a bit different to platform wars like PS vs Xbox, etc.
Fundamentally Valve has built up a lot of trust with the gaming community, and other than microtransactions and gambling, I think it's very fair to say they've been a net good for both the PC gaming community; as well as the ecosystem.
Don't forget big picture mode. Nowadays Steam is a better game console than an actual game console. That's the only way I use it anymore.
...and the hardware ecosystem, too. I just got my Steam controller last week, and it's wonderful. It's so good I'm playing Civ with it. Civ! On a gamepad!
FTFY. Steam forums are a cesspoll most often than not. No, we do not want a easy accessible place where people can spew their crap on the internet. It's either moderated and useful or it shouldn't exists.
Its nice to see someone with this opinion. Im not a prolific user of the Epic Game Store, but when people go on about all the missing features its mostly a lot of cruft that I really don't want. Game ratings/reviews and the "join a game" friend functionality are the only things that I would miss, at a glance, and reviews are mostly covered elsewhere.
Few years ago he made exclusive deals with game producers so their game could only be purchased through Epic's store for one year. Number of these games were already listed on Steam with pre-purchase ability before the agreement. Steam did the right thing and fulfilled any refund request that was made via pre-purchase.
There were a few games I was looking forward to but was blind sided. Being a Linux only gamer, Epic launcher was pure trash. A year after the exclusive deal was over, I never bought any of the games. Those studios are effectively dead to me.
Increasingly, I wish Valve was less propriety. GOG is the correct business model. While they do great things for linux (steam input, proton), I wish these were far less tied to the application.
Without competition Valve would never have bothered making Steam faster. Steam hasn't meaningfully changed in a decade, and feels well out of date. I celebrate Epic forcing Valve to finally make some improvements. Turns out they could do it in a day all along.
They completely rewrote their UI? Do you not remember the old library? The old downloads page? The old big picture mode? You may be suffering from selective memory
I dont care about faster startup times for steam, as long as its under a minute.
If any big company want a good steam alternative we would have it.
Every alternative launcher, uplay/ubisoft connect, origin/ea app, epic games, gog started with a store platform and stopped. Its like the marketing team just looked at the store but not at the rest of the steam features.
I "defend" valve because they're seemingly the only company that cares about the end-user linux experience.
Rocket league used to have a Linux build, then epic decided to kill that off entirely.
I recently bought the steam frame. It's years past when I would have wanted this VR headset the most, but half the reason I bought it was to support Valve's R&D with Linux desktop support, arm JIT translation, etc.
People bitch and moan about "voting with your wallet", then you have a company that tons of people continually vote with their wallet for, then people complain about others defending the one company that doesn't seem to want to screw their userbase over.
Sure Steam has some blind spots for the very sweaty semi-pro gamer. I don't care about virtual stickers and little treats. I care that all my games run on my Linux desktop after years of devs not giving a shit and other companies being openly hostile.
Valves competitors suck. Their VR competitor is Meta which in a just world would not exist as an organization. Their gaming marketplace competitor is Epic, which produces the character-slop extraction shooter and a launcher that gets more annoying to use every time I open it.
The other "competitors" if you can even call them that, are microsoft who has basically deleted a dozen game studios in the last year via moneyball, and other game companies like EA and Ubisoft who routinely delete purchased games and tell the users to go suck it.
Valve is basically the only company out there who is resisting the constant urge to make everything shitty to increase investor profits. They stay private and everyone loves what they do with that power. I'm sure a ton of fail-son PE bros are dying for the chance to buy out valve and turn everything it's ever done to absolute dogshit. We'd be getting half-life 3, 4, 5, 6, mobile, etc and they'd all be shit.
I do genuinely dislike their game launcher, but also I don't want to have multiple game launchers even if it was working well given it's just overhead.
I'll happily pay to have a game on Steam vs getting it for free on Epic. Steam has been a good experience for me the past 2+ decades :)
I wouldnt mind Epic if their platform wasn't so intentionally anti-consumer. I dont have any issues with Epic other products - I dont play Fortnite, but Unreal was net positive for gamedev and Epic also sponsored a lot of open sourcr software including Godot which is nice of them.
Unfortunately literally everything is wrong with EGS specifically.
Their stance on intentionally not having user reviews because consumers shouldn't have power to react to publisher or developers decisions.
Their giving away games for free and then revoking licenses then removing them from accounts even though it was purely their own fault. They were most successful company ever back then and could certainly eat that loss.
Their shitty account system that certainly got hacked multiple times because it's the only gaming platform where someone constantly trying to access my accounts even though I'm Linux and cybersecurity nerd with random 32-char passwords. They also dont have straightforward way to change account region without trying to deal with their shitty support.
Tim Sweeney decided to make a platform to fuck over gamers and we gamers returned favour.
Steam client is INFINITELY faster than Epic client, across those dimensions.
BTW Gaben is my friend and I identify as Dr Gordon Freeman.
/s
Parasocial relationships are a byproduct of the technology you (I assume) and I have and continue to create & roll-out to society, increasing physical distance from actual humans as well as increasing "in the head, only" identity, or identities, that culture carries with itself more and more.
> Parasocial relationships are a byproduct of the technology you
I very very much doubt this. Tools are what sets us apart from other animals. We have dedicated bits of brain for it. The relation between humans and tools, having importance to us, is why we're special. That relation goes way back, with evolutionary pressure the whole way, when losing a tool meant you were in a very bad situation, probably dead, unless you replaced it.
People named ships, swords, etc, going way back in history. There are fables about dedications to tools. It's not some modern thing.
This is why software is slow and everything uses 2GB of RAM at idle: because nobody really cares.
I'm sure that AI made this speedup work much easier and quicker; probably just access to the monorepo and a prompt of "make the launcher boot up faster while changing no functionality. Keep track of before/after benchmark numbers" would be fine as long as you can get your co-workers to approve whatever diff gets spat out the end.
But either of these companies, presumably with dev teams of dozens-hundreds of SWEs, could have pointed to one of them 5 years go and said "spend the next 2 months optimizing the performance of the launcher" and would probably have gotten similar results.
I make my software fast and efficient mostly because I enjoy it. Absolutely nothing stopping web apps, Electron, everything else from being efficient, slim, and performant. It's just that the modicum of effort required to set that up was outweighed by the convenience of just importing and parsing the full 16MB icon cache and 13 unused analytics SDKs every pageload and not worrying about it.
> I'm sure that AI made this speedup work much easier and quicker; probably just access to the monorepo and a prompt of "make the launcher boot up faster while changing no functionality. Keep track of before/after benchmark numbers" would be fine as long as you can get your co-workers to approve whatever diff gets spat out the end.
Yup.
So, here's my relevant example of how "vibe coding" doesn't mean "not caring", an isochrone map generator, real time, about the same total download (in a private window) as Google maps is when looking at Berlin:
It almost certainly still has bugs. And the code itself is probably terrible, because LLMs don't always clean up when you tell them to remove everything related to a bug.
But it is a download that's 90% data, and does get you a real-time updates as you drag your origin around the largest city in the EU.
>probably just access to the monorepo and a prompt of "make the launcher boot up faster while changing no functionality. Keep track of before/after benchmark numbers"
Put it in the loop and you have software Lauch before OS finish booting up
Things nobody has said since like 2005? A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal. Especially when everyone just leaves it running anyway. There's far more significant aspects like memory usage, game library, and general features.
The client is definetly terrible. Slow to start. I have frikkin 2 different topbars that seemingly have similar options. Way to many locations for settings, spammy store page.
Hard to navigate game library. The fact that the store page often is a better look at the game than the one in the library.
Impossible to see what dlcs that is enabled unless you happen to borrow the game from someone in your family. Why van games corrupt and un and reinstalling is the only fix (verifying does sometimes not catch it).
I could go on. Its still the only store with acceptable linux experience sadly.
> A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal.
When I hear about a game on social media I often want to add it to a wishlist on Steam but I dread opening the app because I know it will take forever to open on MacOS.
I don't mind a game launcher taking time, but the store is a part of that which makes it annoying I avoid the native app for that reason.
Startup is one thing, using the program is another. Steamwebhelper, the chromium based tool that renders everything web based in the client is awfully optimized and likes to noticeably utilize the CPU even when minimized on the tray, yet somehow always serves me with a blank page whenever I go store, community etc. on first try, I have to click the label multiple times to get anything. You can't even kill the process, because it's immediately relaunched, I just wish there was an option to disable it and only get the library.
I definitely don't leave the Steam launcher running all the time, on macOS it takes up a non-trivial amount of memory that I want to have available for other apps. I launch Steam when I want to play some games, then quit it when I want to do other stuff.
the steam client is definitely kind of terrible, maybe i’m just biased because i have used steam deck since launch which uses big picture, but there have been bugs in the client that were extremely annoying and obvious that took years to fix (for example, closing a store page and losing page position, but then the page would scroll up when pressing down on a controller for years).
A very obvious non-deck example is how bad it can be at loading and showing videos on the store page. They consistently have issues with smooth playback, this is not my network, others i know have the same issue. it’s to the point that I scroll down and look at gifs in the description for gameplay footage first. I use the discovery queue often and it’s pretty apparent.
When I browse the store, I specifically do it in a browser because the client is so unpleasant to use. For launching games I have no choice. I love Steam as a concept and company, but it is not an enjoyable app to use by its own merits, in my opinion.
just last night I was playing a game on steam, and at a seemingly random point in gameplay (it was Death Stranding, I was just pressing forward like always), every single button on my controller spontaneously remapped to a different button. Turns out my steam input profile had just spontaneously been completely randomized?
All this to say: steam is better than the alternatives, but still has some objectively insane problems.
I said it back when they first migrated to Electron, and I'll say it again now. It's not the slowest thing ever by modern standards, but it's definitely not fast, either, and is pretty bloated in terms of memory usage.
It only looks good if you compare it to the Epic client, which somehow manages to be much worse.
it changed from a small, fast native client to webshit quite a few years ago. the performance is acceptable now but it is indeed magnitudes slower. it also steals focus several times during startup which is the single greatest thing a developer of client software can do to be a shithead
I definitely don’t leave the resource hog Steam running, because it can be slow and terrible. I turned off Steam Overlay and Notifications to get substantial speed up improvements.
My guess based on the timing is that it is primarily for the Steam Frame. Steam is not just a game launcher but the entire desktop environment for the Steam Machine, the Steam Deck, and anything else like Bazzite that uses it as its primary UI as well. But in those cases, while at scale every second saved is nice, for the most part a second here or there doesn't really amount to that much.
But for the Steam Frame, which is probably booting while it is strapped to your face and completely obscuring your vision, every second is felt much more intensely. Anything that can be done to get to first interaction sooner has a much, much larger effect on the feel of the experience.
The speed would always have been nice to have, but it moves beyond "nice to have" for the Steam Frame case into having a significant effect on how it feels to use and the out-of-box experience. Yes, you'll use sleep most of the time, but when you do a full boot or reboot, you feel the seconds.
It was in the beta channel from some time now being updated and refined, steam is constantly updating the beta channel and promotes updates to general channel every now and then.
It's evidence of a really immature business. I previously worked at <place bring in a lot of money from people using their site> specifically doing optimizations, and we were well under 1 second to do most things, but we could measure a 10ms improvement in dollar amount revenue gain through A/B testing. With the framework in place to claim dollar credit for microoptimizations we happily had many many engineers working to improve it. The fact that Valve has nothing of the sort after years is embarrassing and untold amounts of money has been left on the table.
I think that Valve's willingness NOT to chase money as you've described is, ironically, a huge factor in their incredible success. That's not to say that shorter loading times are bad, but AFAIK Valve is already among the US companies with the highest revenue per employee - if they are happy and their customers are happy, who is losing out?
Consider that competitor stores were usually more profit-oriented, which was usually also the reason they failed.
> Ok but why didn't they do it sooner? The Steam client is terrible and there is no excuse for it.
It's bad, but I wouldn't call it terrible.
It does have unresolved annoyances, like how context menus randomly stop working on Linux, and tweaking that setting (whose name I forget) on/off does little to fix them. You have to resort to using Big Picture mode, which is annoying. If they ever fix this, I'd have zero problems with the Steam client.
Mostly though I don't care about the client, I care about the games and they work seamlessly in Linux!
Most likely nobody complained and startup time isn't an important metric for them. The typical user may have Steam launch at startup or launch it once after booting their PC and then leave it running for days or weeks.
Personally, my longest and loudest complaint with steam is reliably putting a long hold on inputs when it starts up. If I launch steam on startup then I can't start doing anything else until it's done because it will jump on top of everything else when it feels like it. This is a particularly bad sin because this behavior is a way for credentials to leak.
I can honestly say I haven’t really had any issues with the client. Sure restoring from tray and starting are slow but other than that it’s been rock solid for me and for something that is mainly hosting a web view it’s nice that it doesn’t eat 1-3GB of memory in the background.
I’m curious what issues you have run into that you consider it terrible?
I have to say, Epics vibe is just malicious and toxic. Steam is silent and just lets things speak for themselves. What is the value of an idea if it does not work in the real world?
I just wish the people at Epic collectively took some vacation and came back with a less breathing down neck attitude towards everything. Just chill out, relax, it is a browser for searching, buying and downloading games
The messaging from Epic was antagonistic to users and disrespects the efforts the engineers put in to making this new client. "We vibecoded it" minimizes the fact that this almost certainly wasn't a one shot prompt and publish but that real people had to work on and test this before releasing it.
It felt like a message to investors rather than users.
Epic can't even bribe users into using their garbage platform. There are people out there who would rather pay Valve (or GOG) for a game, rather than redeeming the free copy on EGS, that's how pathetic their position is. Of course they have to stoop to stupid publicity stunts like this
It's an AI meme site. They don't do real reporting. That's why their source of how long it takes to open Steam is a single out of context clip with no comparison to anything else
Especially when in reality, a warm start with no updates -- i.e. an absolutely unrealistic scenario -- takes 5 seconds just to show the "loading" screen. And 25 more seconds till everything has finished loading and you can interact with the client.
(measured this on the old laptop I use to play the just-released Order of the sinking star)
(the 420 ms to _restore from the tray_ is even crazier -- I remember Firefox used to do warm starts in ~800 ms 20 years ago)
When you vibe code and tell your agent to "keep working till everything loads inside 100 milliseconds", you end up with a super hideous codebase which does insane things like having a custom memory allocator, handwritten assembly, etc etc.
A decent nvme ssd can read ~35GB of data in 5 seconds for reference.
Or you can download 66MB of data on a 100mbit/s internet connection in 5 seconds.
Say you need to load 1gb from disk and need to download 1MB of data from internet. It should take ~75 milliseconds to do that.
It is incredibly slow, considering Valve is a billion dollar company. This level of optimization is closer to what you would expect from a person who is programming as a hobby.
Yes, exactly why I'm making that (potentially harsh) statement.
It really shouldn't take much more than that, most of what you see there is already pre-loaded on disk (I'd hope) like your most recent plays etc, much of it can be cached and rendered directly from that cache, even progressive loading of store images should make it a very, very tiny download from the web.
I had suspected that they simply invoked client ready faster and let misc information fetch in background. After a little bit of reversing they did infact just make the client spawn earlier.
Steam client was always fast, majority of load time is (and forever will be) network speed.
Not that it's specifically relevant to this but it's bloody terrible that we need any launcher at all. A whole generation is barely even aware that you used to able to buy and play a game without an online middleman sitting on your computer.
Not only that, a lot of "gamers" refuse to play games that are not on Steam (not only talking about stuff like EGS-exclusives but games that have their own launcher or just EXE's).
Epic Games doesn't even have reviews for games, I don't know how they expect to be taken as a serious competitor to Steam, and I'm all for competition for the record.
Both take way too long because of all that electron bloat. I miss being able to load a small app in under 1s. Everything has telemetry or online verification/updating now.
Steam client and the Steam webpage still feels like it was stuck in the very early 2000s. Just look at the page source. Ridiculous. Maybe with AI they can finally replace both of those crapmountains.
No proper gallery, terrible video viewing experience. Broadcast live right into your face. I mean they don't swim in pools of money, they can't afford it. The cabals are so busy.... and of course Gabe Newell needs all the money for his shiny brain interface startup :D.
And that's why having some competition is useful for consumers. I would like to see this trend to continue and game launchers improving not only startup times, but RAM usage and disk size usage. I just looked into my `.steam` directory, and it is taking up over 10GB of disk size, and I have only single game installed, that is only about 500MB in size.
Now patiently waiting for GOG answer to this competition.
What are the possibilities of AI learning how to code efficient apps, e.g. low memory apps, or faster apps, or both? I feel like that is the kind of cheap work that requires too much intelligence for humans, yet provides immense benefits to users.
Just recently I learned Listary has a new beta written in Rust. It is fast! The previous one kept crashing. Asking AI to code Rust style, is probably a shortcut method.
I think vibe coding will force everyone to stay on their toes and keep being at the edge, moat defences have lowered and competition is up, as consumers we will get much better products for much cheaper. Let's just hope there is enough people left with jobs to pay for the services and the others can re-invent theirselves in a career that is still valuable in an LLM world.
There are broken windows everywhere I look when people are using AI, including the launcher. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory even with large companies the acceptance of small issues here and there is concerning.
Honestly, I have no idea what business Steam has starting for whopping 5 seconds as it is right now (after the 'speedup').
It is a simple shell for launching already downloaded apps. This is disgrace and nothing to boast about, especially considering Valve takes 30% cut of basically PC gaming marked for making it.
It's way more than this. Some may argue about how useful all of these features are, but Steam client is also a store (with lots of personalizations), a social network (forums, text and voice chat, personal profiles etc), a mod hosting platform, a game review site, a digital marketplace (cards and items. You may be surprised how popular this aspect is). It also does the controller remapping, manages cloud saves and screenshots/videos, allows to store games at several locations at ones. It provides games related news, checks for updates on all of the installed games.
Again, one may argue how useful all of this is, but it is there, and most users likely have the app on a OS startup anyway.
E.g. it checks integrity of ALL resources on each start. You could break/remove ~any file from install folder, as long as you have intact entry binary (steam.exe) it'll start and fix everything.
That's likely really useful against bit rot / corruption due to unstable overclock (XMP / EXPO profiles come with no guarantee of stability).
Wow this is really the unthinking man's blog post. This is a known slop news site and HN should not allow it here. I like Steam, but at least Epic actually gave a comparison that we can interpret as two load times on the same PC. These metrics are completely useless without that.
Somebody clipping how long it takes Steam to open on their computer with no other context is pretty meaningless. For all we know, it's running slower on their computer today. There's no before/after, no comparison to Epic. Yet this article just confidently asserted the figure as universal. Moronic.
If this is the start of epic competing on features and quality for both devs and players instead of just buying up exclusive rights then I'm all for it
Valve: “thank God we are paying (checks notes) hundreds of thousands to be .5 seconds faster on a desktop app boot. Let’s push out the marketing material!”
The 'vibe coded' part needs to go. Both teams likely used AI-assisted coding. Neither team's product was completed by robots, not with current tech. Epic had the launcher update ready in advance to handle the bad PR from their announcement. Prepare for more announcements from Epic how AI and not humans solved something.
The industry is trying to sanitize this term to be synonymous with AI-assisted coding and I hate it. They are trying to blur the lines between skilled engineers who use AI, and everyone else.
It may be faster than Epic, but it is still unreasonably slow for something that really does very little at the end of the day. It's quite tragic that the company that brought us Proton and Windows games on Linux at near equal performance can't do a better job with the client or can't be bothered to improve it. That, and the decades old bugs in Half Life, Left 4 Dead and other classic games that probably still generate not insignificant revenue.
How about actually testing both launchers on same device or at least give startup numbers of steam before/after update? So annoyed by this "comparison" honestly.
This website is just reddit at this point. No one reads the article, no one cares about what is actually true , everyone is just giving their own anecdotes about some random shit.
This article is completely worthless and contains zero useful information, no conclusions about anything can be derived from it.
From my own testing the Epic launcher is still significantly faster than steam at launch, but I do not know if I have gotten the update or if its on a beta branch.
Presumably people here understand how software profiling or whatever works, why can no one here see how obviously nonsensical the reporting here is.
Like when they made two generations of XBox consoles boot 5 seconds faster by making the unskippable boot animation 5 seconds shorter. Many years after the exact same issue bottlenecked Windows 7 boot times on SSDs.
I really hate all these gaming related wars. I liked it better when arguing about stuff like this was regarded as juvenile. It’s a sign of our times I guess, grown men so withdrawn from the system that these sort of battles are front and center to a lot of them.
This is a garbage article, lmao. Comparing architectures as "AI assisted (vibe coded)" and "Optimized modular CEF", and highlighting Steam as being faster in tray restore when it is slower.
Great. Now make it not need a constantly running process, and not using GB of memory when I forget to close it. May not be a big deal on a desktop, but on a laptop having this kind of bloat is obnoxious.
They would have to rewrite the app and use Tauri/WebView2 or native code. CEF blows up your memory use because you ship a whole ass Chromium browser.
You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though. It's just how they work, you need to keep track of play time and respond to any API calls from the game. But it could be a native background daemon instead of two Steam Web Helpers.
> You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though
I disagree. I get that steam has useful features I want while in-game (e.g. invite a friend to play), but there's no reason it couldn't just run this launcher only when a steam game is running and immediately exit once it's done.
Also, I think a lot of people forget how small well written software can be -- we're talking like single or double digit megabytes. Heck there's a whole linux distro that's under 20mb.
> They would have to rewrite the app and use Tauri/WebView2 or native code. CEF blows up your memory use because you ship a whole ass Chromium browser.
The only benefits of Tauri are the smaller application package and the fact that the runtime is always up to date (which can also be a downside). That full package doesn't live in RAM when it's running, so it's "merely" wasted disk space and not RAM. In terms of RAM it uses just as much as electron or CEF.
Can we stop putting Chrome in everything? Why does it take billions of instructions and hundreds of thousands to billions of bytes of RAM to display some text and pictures?
Fair question, but there is a decent answer. It's because Steam is an app that is shipped to 3 platforms and at least 2 architectures; the web platform is a platform- and architecture-agnostic target; and there is an extremely large set of tools and large developer pool to pull from. It may not be the set of you trade-offs you would have chosen, but it's also a reasonable choice for the problem they are tackling with the set of real-world constraints they are presented with.
Issue: valve announced the beta steam client was finally 64bits clean and nope it cannot start games if you remove 32bits support since their "reaper" command is still 32bits....
Unless I missed something? Yeah? Anyone to enlighten me?
its funny people complain on steam while they use ultra slow office or teams or windows everyday thats bloated with zillion shit no one asked, I think things should be optional, I have steelseries headphones and their drivers are shit so thank god there is open source alternative only two megabytes and does everything I need. Discord is total shit of an app I will never ever use. etc etc, steam is not super but I had zero issues last 20 years, it just works, sharing, recording, streaming, voicechat, russians took my steam completly and I was able to restore it with ease. Steam is absolute champion.
It is incredibly funny that Steam could have fixed this at any time, but didn't prioritise doing so until Epic openly challenged them. This is why we can't have nice things™
Welcome. Sadly right now the initial activation (when UI appears) can still be a noticeable time after process launch, and thus still feel a bit like a focus steal, but hopefully there will be improvements there soon.
Epic Games, Inc. owns the RAD Debugger source code yet instead of pointing the clanker (and/or their human(s)!!) at it and saying hey go make a instantaneously-launching high-performance modern library/storefront application based on that, instead they vibecoded up yet another Modern Web Stack travesty that still takes plural seconds to launch—and they have the gall to brag about it as though this is some kind of massive achievement?!
Like, awesome, at least the freaking game launcher/storefront experience is no longer an Unreal Engine game—great work guys, huge improvement, now it's not a total shitshow of unimaginable ineptitude, just a regular, run-of-the-mill shitshow. But that's hardly worth patting yourselves on the back about!
Nobody asked for this! We just want more, better and cheaper games! That's it. I could care less how quick it takes to launch an app which then stays open for hours/days.
I was in my 30s before I understood that people say "could care less" when they mean "couldn't care less." I'll never understand how people can say it without wanting to claw out their larynx as badly as it makes me want to claw out my eardrums, but I'm gradually learning acceptance -- and how not to let my horror show on my face.
This feels like a strange argument given site we are on. "Why are applications so slow and bloated these days" has been a pretty constant complaint around here for many, many years.
I used to think vibe coding would get us slow Electron apps but now we got speed wars between game launchers. I hope this comes for all types of software.
With that said, I tested it right now and Steam takes about 2 seconds to restore from tray and 10-15 for cold boot. The new Epic launcher is around 0.5 and 5 like the article mentioned. Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something.
It's nice but a low bar. Steam pioneered crappy Chrome-based desktop apps before Electron existed, which is also why it's so hard to run Steam in Wine. It has a longer startup and shutdown process (they even call it that) than my entire OS.
Epic, EA, etc then made their own similar launchers. Of course all of them also want to launch when Windows boots, update constantly, and not close when you press close.
I’m pretty sure the early steam client was based on Trident before chromium no?
Edit: actually it seems to have been Trident, then WebKit, then Chromium Embedded
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Out of interest why would you run Steam in Wine?
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I think these days it's easier to run Steam in Wine than it is to run Wine in the first place. If you're running a commercial packaging of Wine for gaming, both things are trivial.
(Successfully running Windows games is its own issue: I think "Steam Deck" compatibility badging is a pretty reliable tell for Linux gaming, but on a Mac, having the game be playable is a gamble on install and again with every patch.)
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They used IE in the beginning.
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Vibe coding can yield us Tauri apps that end up being like 3mb rather than 130mb for a "Hello World" app.
I would go one step farther - if you're vibe coding, skip Tauri altogether. I've been on-and-off vibecoding a GitKraken replacement using egui instead, and the memory footprint is very low. Otherwise can't tell the difference, as I'm not reading the code either way.
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You can just skip Tauri entirely and get true native apps. No web wrapping required
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Like these https://goodapps.store/
Disclaimer: All mine, open-source, ai-assisted, less than 5MB each. I love rust+tauri combo.
Tauri doesn't solve the problems Electron solves. It just externalizes the solution so things can subtly stop working randomly.
Much better it can give us just webview in wry and winit without tauri bloat
Except EGS's slop garbage is 400MB on linux
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I actually think that vibe coding lends itself well to stuff with really strict type systems. When you use Claude Code, it basically works on a loop until it gets something "right". A type system allows for part of the "right" criteria to be baked into the compilation, giving a hard block if it doesn't at least pass that.
I've had reasonably good luck having Claude generate Rust code that performs well.
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I see it as a forcing function to clean up tech debt
> forcing function to clean up tech debt
The real reason rewrites to fix tech debt used to fail was that it took too long to get to feature partity & the goal posts moved constantly while you were on the rewrite team.
The sunk cost of existing code is no longer considered in a rewrite.
Maybe it was hard to write in the first place, but it is not hard to rewrite anymore, as long you've got decent tests.
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> Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something
Are you on the beta branch? It doesn't look like its in stable yet (Settings --> Interface --> Client Beta Participation)
Also, you're going to get a different speed up depending on which page you have set as your starting page.
If you have steam configured so it shows the store page on startup, you have to add on the time it for that page to load.
i don't care how fast it is beyond a certain point. What is more shocking is all the bugs that vibe coding landed epic. I can't imagine shipping software at this scale in this state.
I really hope this comes true. I'd love Electron-free versions of Discord and Teams. I've been building a native Rust/GPUI desktop app, and the difference in startup and memory is huge.
yeah, Steam takes forever to start, one of the slowest apps I use. Photoshop is similarly lethargic starting up.
Counter-intuitively (or intuitively if you’re inside the industry), slow Electron apps became the norm because of how much developers cost. Now that AI can step in with parallel expertise at scale, I suspect we’ll have all sorts of optimization races.
On the other hand, OpenAI has recently successfully ported the abysmal performance of ChatGPT/Codex on macOS to the web (at least in Firefox) with no end in sight…
Prioritization still matters. Agents will happily optimize your app for performance, but at least current ones seem like you need to explicitly tell them.
Misc speed improvements, security updates on old applications… I’m doing a lot of that lately, quite quickly.
It’s similar for the productivity/launcher app Raycast. They’re trying to find new USPs compared to the many copycats.
Surprise it’s speed wars between Electron apps. Steam is based on Chromium/Electron.
The new version of Epic is based on Tauri. Also written in JS and probably React (haven't decompiled it yet) but the web runtime is part of Windows instead of shipped with the app so it takes less disk space and RAM. And you can write perf sensitive code in Rust for even more speedup.
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Interesting, I didn't know they moved to a Chromium based desktop application. But honestly, I don't feel like there's any performance issues with the steam desktop client (I'm running it on Fedora, but I'm assuming performance is relatively similar on different platforms).
Ref: https://docs.steambrew.app/developers/environment
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I'd imagine one can now focus on creating a client for a single OS and having the AI do the porting to others as it would essentially be a translation.
Perhaps it will bring back native apps because supporting other platforms is less laborious.
Hopefully LLM models and harnesses improve to where Chromium or Electron apps can be more trivially converted to native apps. You're paying for tokens for downstream compute efficiency across the user base.
They already are. I asked opus 5.5 to plan out and begin building a swift version of my electron notes app, using a similar architecture / feature set. I hut enter and honestly forgot about it. 2 hours later im reading slack while making my next round of coffee, and my session is interrupted by a native app opening on my phone (the model installed it for me to test). It.... has 2/3 of the features already and looks awesome, holy crap. It skipped my suggestion to use the Lexical (web) editor and is.... using. platform native one.
time will tell if it can make it the way i like but.... it can definitely get far. Used 40% of my session limits on my $20/mo sub.
I wonder what best practices here look like at this point. In my world, we've moved past skills for something like this, having porting helper/validator/etc things be harness level is measurably better than what skills look like right now. The open plugin spec is certainly an improvement (namely in packaging and distribution)- but, really you'd be leaving perf on the table if you were not to tune your harness. I wonder if something like dsh, pi, or other extensible (coding) harnesses have something like a concept of "harness as an extension".
Not really a war. Steam updated their client the day before Epic decided to mouth off. Kinda hilarious actually.
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It’s just that the vibe coded stuff has so many assumptions baked in, that you will be constantly surprised about the behaviors your slopped codebase has. Doesn’t matter for small tools, where you’ll be delighted that clicking that one label copies it to your clipboard - nice one, Claude, that’s delightful!
It’s less nice when your web app launches that other service only when the other Tailscale node is up, because the agent interpreted your prompt as a hard access rule.
It's because no matter how 'good' the AI output is, "vibe coding" is strongly associated with "completely unreviewed and untested". LLMs have brought the skill floor straight through the ground and into the depths of hell, so people are doubly cautious with it because there's a very good chance with any vibe coded app that there's not a single person in the world that truly understands what it actually does just behind the scenes. It could be completely fine, or it could be breaking your system or uploading your sensitive data somewhere because the vibe coder provided flawed instructions or the LLM decided to make an unexpected 'optimization'. Wanna roll the dice and find out which one it is?
I'm reserving "vibe coding" in my head for "the programming style where you just prompt your way around without even looking at the code and only caring if your happy path works".
I have a couple of nice "vibe coded" apps I would never dream of releasing because I'm not interested in the QA, more than anything else. The problem is the other people who are not quite so considerate and think that what they tossed out in 15 minutes is of interest to the rest of the world. The value of a software package release now is more in the QA than the code.
Yeah I'm really impressed by what Opus 5.5 can manage.
I feel like human code is on a wide quality spectrum. The best human code is way better than what Opus 5.5 can do. But the average code, I'm not so sure.
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I feel bad for your employer
> Human code is slop.
I'm not saying you have to be grateful to the millions of people whose work the AI you use was trained on, but why shit on them...
Opus 5.5 is impressive and I'm happy using it to write a ton of code.
But it also still writes awful code with poor maintainability if you don't keep a very close eye on it.
Trust me I know what it's like. I do a lot of it. Even with Opus you still have to guide it aggressively or your codebase turns to slop.
An experienced dev with Claude is better than either of them alone but you can't just point your agent at a repo and expect good results. And when people talk about vibe coding that's usually what they mean.
> People still talk about "Vibe coding" or implying "vibe coded" stuff is poor quality
Yes they do. Because it is. Anyone who cares about the quality of their product is, at minimum, carefully reviewing the output from an LLM to make sure it didn't sneak in anything crazy. More likely they are writing a lot of code by hand, because that is faster than reviewing and correcting the LLM code. Competent developers do not just hand it off and say "the AI is really good so I can trust what it put out".
Creating slop was already a solved problem before AI. AI just made it much more efficient.
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human code is slop. tell us all what the LLMs were trained on? slop?
> Epic may have “vibe coded” a faster client, but Valve proved that targeted optimization on a decades-old ecosystem can still beat out AI speedruns.
Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI.
I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
Once I had a good benchmark script, Opus 4.8 or whatever made my terminal app faster with less memory than ghostty and kitty. It's not even interesting.
> I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
This is probably the saddest comment I've read on HN. It really shows the state of this place and how far into psychosis the comments have fallen.
Why exactly is it the saddest?
every comment mentioning "ai psychosis" is an amazing caricature. people whining about original thoughts repeating the same resident tropes over and over again. basically just throwing out insults. try that for sad.
same people usually who'd be livid about misusing mental health status labels, and torturing language in general. but it's okay, as it is for a noble purpose: insulting people whose opinion you currently feel sufficiently uppity and righteous about. that will raise the bar!
the "last bastions of human values" demonstrating the absolute bottom of the barrel human behavior and intellect. good bit worse than sad, really.
> The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
The dark forest hypothesis is that we can't find any alien life because it's dangerous to broadcast your existence and location to competitors. So rational thing for every alien civilian to do (and arguably for us) is to keep quiet.
But what does it mean in this context?
I'll try: It's dangerous to broadcast your AI use to competitors, users and the public for fear of being attacked.
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It's "sort of" a dark forest problem because admitting you're using AI is socially risky. Indeed, this entire thread is built on the idea that Epic's lazy use of AI has been bested by the savvy & righteous programmers at Valve[1].
So people who think AI is actually a really useful tool and that using it to make your project better will imagine that everyone who makes things better today uses AI at least a little, and assumes they don't talk about it because they don't want to get yelled at. Meanwhile, if you think AI does bad work (or is often used badly) you can ascribe bad software to bad uses of the tool. We can never know for sure because people don't talk about it.
[1] I happen to agree with this dichotomy but that belief precedes AI
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Yeah exactly, Valve engineers probably just told AI to make it faster.
Your "dark forest" analogy sounds reasonable but Epic's outright admission of "vibe coding" is a bit of a footgun considering how rabidly anti-AI the folks on sites like Reddit are. If they had just been like, "it's faster and supports Linux" they would be the darling of the internet.
Epic Games wants to make an "AI-first" game, so they need to push "vibe coding" onto the gaming audiences to get them to accept it before they lay off people and ask $69 for a game where the art is made by an AI model.
https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3mxp...
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> If they had just been like, "it's faster and supports Linux" they would be the darling of the internet.
Our humans suddenly became 37% smarter, for no discernible reason. No, don't ask why.
> I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI...
I don't see why not. They clearly know what they are doing at Valve, and for an engineer who knows what he's doing, LLMs are of very limited use.
I know a few very serious and well compensated programmers with decades of experience. These people work on prominent open source projects, climate modelling, linear programming, large org enginneering. Every single one of them uses LLMs heavily and swears by the increased productivity of using them.
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I find the opposite. A good engineer would tell the agent the "know what they know they're doing" part. Let the AI take that direction and context, let it implement/test it 100x faster than a human can by hand, the engineer come back and confirm AI did the job about the same way as they would have wanted it to be done themselves.
> for an engineer who knows what he's doing, LLMs are of very limited use
LLMs are very good at code analysis, and finding both security issues and optimization opportunities. Yes, even in code written by highly experienced human engineers. Failing to have an LLM look for places where your code could be optimized is, IMHO, indefensible. It's like shipping your binaries compiled at -O0 - deliberately choosing to waste your users' time and hardware resources because you couldn't be bothered to properly configure and run a tool.
If they knew what they are doing, it wouldn't take them >5000ms to draw a rectangle in win32
Whew. The delusions on this site are getting out of hand.
LLMs are more than a second brain for some folks here, without it they would literally be useless
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> They clearly know what they are doing at Valve
Yeah, at promoting child gambling. Not sure about games
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All I can think with this whole situation is how much time is wasted by people getting angry and defensive on behalf of a Valve. It's almost like people have a parasocial relationship with the application itself.
That's not even getting to some of the "missing" features.
No Community marketplace for in-game items
No Direct player-to-player item trading
No Digital trading cards, levelling, and points shop
I hope more application developers "forget" to add these features.
People have wasted their time defending their platform's "honour" for decades. It used to be Sega vs Nintendo. Then it was PlayStation vs XBox. Now it's Steam vs EGS.
Anyway, what are useful features of Steam:
- their dedication to getting Windows games running on Linux (to see off the existential threat Microsoft poses to them, but nonetheless greatly appreciated)
- community forums / screenshots / artwork / guides etc. for every product. Very useful if the game vendor doesn't have its own, and most game vendors don't
- that Steam Sales encourage vendors to offer games at much more reasonable prices (e.g. a few pounds/dollars/etc.) for what is effectively a license, revocable at any time, not a real purchase. £60? Ha ha fuck off, I'm waiting for the sale when it's £5
- also, as far as I've seen, every game distributed can still be downloaded today. People may complain that publishers update a title e.g. to remove licensed music 10 years later... but you can still download the old version with some trickery. And I've never seen Steam actively remove downloads for existing customers, I've only seen games removed from the store so no future customers
- pirates have found that most games, if their only DRM is Steamworks, are incredibly easy to crack. I am very glad Steam has convinced most publishers to use that alone and nothing worse, and I curse publishers who insist on their own DRM, their own launcher, etc. If Valve goes tits-up, I have a lot of confidence most of peoples libraries will still be playable with a little bit of cracking.
There are other useful features, even if Valve is getting rich and fat off selling gambling and day-trading to teenagers.
I think the "fanboyism" of Steam is a bit different to platform wars like PS vs Xbox, etc.
Fundamentally Valve has built up a lot of trust with the gaming community, and other than microtransactions and gambling, I think it's very fair to say they've been a net good for both the PC gaming community; as well as the ecosystem.
Proton is a great example.
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Don't forget big picture mode. Nowadays Steam is a better game console than an actual game console. That's the only way I use it anymore.
...and the hardware ecosystem, too. I just got my Steam controller last week, and it's wonderful. It's so good I'm playing Civ with it. Civ! On a gamepad!
> unmodderated community forums
FTFY. Steam forums are a cesspoll most often than not. No, we do not want a easy accessible place where people can spew their crap on the internet. It's either moderated and useful or it shouldn't exists.
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Its nice to see someone with this opinion. Im not a prolific user of the Epic Game Store, but when people go on about all the missing features its mostly a lot of cruft that I really don't want. Game ratings/reviews and the "join a game" friend functionality are the only things that I would miss, at a glance, and reviews are mostly covered elsewhere.
First thing in the article: "this is such a good day to be a sweeney hater" I don't even want to know what this means, dude needs to get a hobby.
Tim Sweeney is the CEO of Epic Games. [0]
I personally have no respect for him.
Few years ago he made exclusive deals with game producers so their game could only be purchased through Epic's store for one year. Number of these games were already listed on Steam with pre-purchase ability before the agreement. Steam did the right thing and fulfilled any refund request that was made via pre-purchase.
There were a few games I was looking forward to but was blind sided. Being a Linux only gamer, Epic launcher was pure trash. A year after the exclusive deal was over, I never bought any of the games. Those studios are effectively dead to me.
I personally will never fund Tim Sweeney.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Sweeney
Increasingly, I wish Valve was less propriety. GOG is the correct business model. While they do great things for linux (steam input, proton), I wish these were far less tied to the application.
Without competition Valve would never have bothered making Steam faster. Steam hasn't meaningfully changed in a decade, and feels well out of date. I celebrate Epic forcing Valve to finally make some improvements. Turns out they could do it in a day all along.
> Steam hasn't meaningfully changed in a decade
They completely rewrote their UI? Do you not remember the old library? The old downloads page? The old big picture mode? You may be suffering from selective memory
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I dont care about faster startup times for steam, as long as its under a minute.
If any big company want a good steam alternative we would have it.
Every alternative launcher, uplay/ubisoft connect, origin/ea app, epic games, gog started with a store platform and stopped. Its like the marketing team just looked at the store but not at the rest of the steam features.
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I "defend" valve because they're seemingly the only company that cares about the end-user linux experience.
Rocket league used to have a Linux build, then epic decided to kill that off entirely.
I recently bought the steam frame. It's years past when I would have wanted this VR headset the most, but half the reason I bought it was to support Valve's R&D with Linux desktop support, arm JIT translation, etc.
People bitch and moan about "voting with your wallet", then you have a company that tons of people continually vote with their wallet for, then people complain about others defending the one company that doesn't seem to want to screw their userbase over.
Sure Steam has some blind spots for the very sweaty semi-pro gamer. I don't care about virtual stickers and little treats. I care that all my games run on my Linux desktop after years of devs not giving a shit and other companies being openly hostile.
Valves competitors suck. Their VR competitor is Meta which in a just world would not exist as an organization. Their gaming marketplace competitor is Epic, which produces the character-slop extraction shooter and a launcher that gets more annoying to use every time I open it.
The other "competitors" if you can even call them that, are microsoft who has basically deleted a dozen game studios in the last year via moneyball, and other game companies like EA and Ubisoft who routinely delete purchased games and tell the users to go suck it.
Valve is basically the only company out there who is resisting the constant urge to make everything shitty to increase investor profits. They stay private and everyone loves what they do with that power. I'm sure a ton of fail-son PE bros are dying for the chance to buy out valve and turn everything it's ever done to absolute dogshit. We'd be getting half-life 3, 4, 5, 6, mobile, etc and they'd all be shit.
I "defend" valve because they're seemingly the only company that cares about the end-user linux experience.
Why bother defending them about this specific issue though?
Either Epic is right, and this pushes Valve to improve Steam performance.
Or Epic is wrong, and then who cares? People will continue to not use the Epic store and continue to use Steam.
It just feels more "defensive" then "defending" if that framing makes sense.
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hear, hear!
I think in this case people just really hate Epic.
I do genuinely dislike their game launcher, but also I don't want to have multiple game launchers even if it was working well given it's just overhead.
I'll happily pay to have a game on Steam vs getting it for free on Epic. Steam has been a good experience for me the past 2+ decades :)
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I wouldnt mind Epic if their platform wasn't so intentionally anti-consumer. I dont have any issues with Epic other products - I dont play Fortnite, but Unreal was net positive for gamedev and Epic also sponsored a lot of open sourcr software including Godot which is nice of them.
Unfortunately literally everything is wrong with EGS specifically.
Their stance on intentionally not having user reviews because consumers shouldn't have power to react to publisher or developers decisions.
Their giving away games for free and then revoking licenses then removing them from accounts even though it was purely their own fault. They were most successful company ever back then and could certainly eat that loss.
Their shitty account system that certainly got hacked multiple times because it's the only gaming platform where someone constantly trying to access my accounts even though I'm Linux and cybersecurity nerd with random 32-char passwords. They also dont have straightforward way to change account region without trying to deal with their shitty support.
Tim Sweeney decided to make a platform to fuck over gamers and we gamers returned favour.
luckily, epic is worth hating.
> No User-written text reviews
Everything you don’t like, you can avoid.
One of the top post on the steam sub reddit is titled "They got us guys." as if they work for Valve.
Bonus points, this is the text from the post.
> How out of touch can you be as a company, this is embarrassing
Steam client is INFINITELY faster than Epic client, across those dimensions.
BTW Gaben is my friend and I identify as Dr Gordon Freeman.
/s
Parasocial relationships are a byproduct of the technology you (I assume) and I have and continue to create & roll-out to society, increasing physical distance from actual humans as well as increasing "in the head, only" identity, or identities, that culture carries with itself more and more.
> Parasocial relationships are a byproduct of the technology you
I very very much doubt this. Tools are what sets us apart from other animals. We have dedicated bits of brain for it. The relation between humans and tools, having importance to us, is why we're special. That relation goes way back, with evolutionary pressure the whole way, when losing a tool meant you were in a very bad situation, probably dead, unless you replaced it.
People named ships, swords, etc, going way back in history. There are fables about dedications to tools. It's not some modern thing.
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This is why software is slow and everything uses 2GB of RAM at idle: because nobody really cares.
I'm sure that AI made this speedup work much easier and quicker; probably just access to the monorepo and a prompt of "make the launcher boot up faster while changing no functionality. Keep track of before/after benchmark numbers" would be fine as long as you can get your co-workers to approve whatever diff gets spat out the end.
But either of these companies, presumably with dev teams of dozens-hundreds of SWEs, could have pointed to one of them 5 years go and said "spend the next 2 months optimizing the performance of the launcher" and would probably have gotten similar results.
I make my software fast and efficient mostly because I enjoy it. Absolutely nothing stopping web apps, Electron, everything else from being efficient, slim, and performant. It's just that the modicum of effort required to set that up was outweighed by the convenience of just importing and parsing the full 16MB icon cache and 13 unused analytics SDKs every pageload and not worrying about it.
> I'm sure that AI made this speedup work much easier and quicker; probably just access to the monorepo and a prompt of "make the launcher boot up faster while changing no functionality. Keep track of before/after benchmark numbers" would be fine as long as you can get your co-workers to approve whatever diff gets spat out the end.
Yup.
So, here's my relevant example of how "vibe coding" doesn't mean "not caring", an isochrone map generator, real time, about the same total download (in a private window) as Google maps is when looking at Berlin:
https://benwheatley.github.io/Isochrone/web/?region=berlin&n...
It almost certainly still has bugs. And the code itself is probably terrible, because LLMs don't always clean up when you tell them to remove everything related to a bug.
But it is a download that's 90% data, and does get you a real-time updates as you drag your origin around the largest city in the EU.
>probably just access to the monorepo and a prompt of "make the launcher boot up faster while changing no functionality. Keep track of before/after benchmark numbers"
Put it in the loop and you have software Lauch before OS finish booting up
That's actually a workaround to make a Windows Steam console for your TV. Replace the explorer.exe shell with steam.exe --bigpicture.
Ok but why didn't they do it sooner? The Steam client is terrible and there is no excuse for it.
> The Steam client is terrible
Things nobody has said since like 2005? A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal. Especially when everyone just leaves it running anyway. There's far more significant aspects like memory usage, game library, and general features.
The client is definetly terrible. Slow to start. I have frikkin 2 different topbars that seemingly have similar options. Way to many locations for settings, spammy store page. Hard to navigate game library. The fact that the store page often is a better look at the game than the one in the library. Impossible to see what dlcs that is enabled unless you happen to borrow the game from someone in your family. Why van games corrupt and un and reinstalling is the only fix (verifying does sometimes not catch it).
I could go on. Its still the only store with acceptable linux experience sadly.
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> A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal.
When I hear about a game on social media I often want to add it to a wishlist on Steam but I dread opening the app because I know it will take forever to open on MacOS.
I don't mind a game launcher taking time, but the store is a part of that which makes it annoying I avoid the native app for that reason.
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Startup is one thing, using the program is another. Steamwebhelper, the chromium based tool that renders everything web based in the client is awfully optimized and likes to noticeably utilize the CPU even when minimized on the tray, yet somehow always serves me with a blank page whenever I go store, community etc. on first try, I have to click the label multiple times to get anything. You can't even kill the process, because it's immediately relaunched, I just wish there was an option to disable it and only get the library.
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I definitely don't leave the Steam launcher running all the time, on macOS it takes up a non-trivial amount of memory that I want to have available for other apps. I launch Steam when I want to play some games, then quit it when I want to do other stuff.
the steam client is definitely kind of terrible, maybe i’m just biased because i have used steam deck since launch which uses big picture, but there have been bugs in the client that were extremely annoying and obvious that took years to fix (for example, closing a store page and losing page position, but then the page would scroll up when pressing down on a controller for years).
A very obvious non-deck example is how bad it can be at loading and showing videos on the store page. They consistently have issues with smooth playback, this is not my network, others i know have the same issue. it’s to the point that I scroll down and look at gifs in the description for gameplay footage first. I use the discovery queue often and it’s pretty apparent.
When I browse the store, I specifically do it in a browser because the client is so unpleasant to use. For launching games I have no choice. I love Steam as a concept and company, but it is not an enjoyable app to use by its own merits, in my opinion.
just last night I was playing a game on steam, and at a seemingly random point in gameplay (it was Death Stranding, I was just pressing forward like always), every single button on my controller spontaneously remapped to a different button. Turns out my steam input profile had just spontaneously been completely randomized?
All this to say: steam is better than the alternatives, but still has some objectively insane problems.
I find it very annoying. But not annoying enough to make me stop using Steam.
The upsides of having a de facto monopoly, I suppose—lamentably common story in tech.
Just as a counter-point, I have in fact said this since I first installed it in 2004.
I said it back when they first migrated to Electron, and I'll say it again now. It's not the slowest thing ever by modern standards, but it's definitely not fast, either, and is pretty bloated in terms of memory usage.
It only looks good if you compare it to the Epic client, which somehow manages to be much worse.
Well two of us have said it just today so you’ll have to update your assumption.
Steam is dogshit and it’s crazy they haven’t optimised it all in 20 years.
Steam is literally just a DRM layer. I'd honestly prefer to not even have a layer between me and my games.
the steam client on my current windows system is using 115mb of ram. I don't care how long it takes to start up, i just start it and leave it running.
Steam crashes my window manager every time I close it now. This started a couple weeks ago.
it changed from a small, fast native client to webshit quite a few years ago. the performance is acceptable now but it is indeed magnitudes slower. it also steals focus several times during startup which is the single greatest thing a developer of client software can do to be a shithead
I definitely don’t leave the resource hog Steam running, because it can be slow and terrible. I turned off Steam Overlay and Notifications to get substantial speed up improvements.
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My guess based on the timing is that it is primarily for the Steam Frame. Steam is not just a game launcher but the entire desktop environment for the Steam Machine, the Steam Deck, and anything else like Bazzite that uses it as its primary UI as well. But in those cases, while at scale every second saved is nice, for the most part a second here or there doesn't really amount to that much.
But for the Steam Frame, which is probably booting while it is strapped to your face and completely obscuring your vision, every second is felt much more intensely. Anything that can be done to get to first interaction sooner has a much, much larger effect on the feel of the experience.
The speed would always have been nice to have, but it moves beyond "nice to have" for the Steam Frame case into having a significant effect on how it feels to use and the out-of-box experience. Yes, you'll use sleep most of the time, but when you do a full boot or reboot, you feel the seconds.
It was in the beta channel from some time now being updated and refined, steam is constantly updating the beta channel and promotes updates to general channel every now and then.
It's evidence of a really immature business. I previously worked at <place bring in a lot of money from people using their site> specifically doing optimizations, and we were well under 1 second to do most things, but we could measure a 10ms improvement in dollar amount revenue gain through A/B testing. With the framework in place to claim dollar credit for microoptimizations we happily had many many engineers working to improve it. The fact that Valve has nothing of the sort after years is embarrassing and untold amounts of money has been left on the table.
I think that Valve's willingness NOT to chase money as you've described is, ironically, a huge factor in their incredible success. That's not to say that shorter loading times are bad, but AFAIK Valve is already among the US companies with the highest revenue per employee - if they are happy and their customers are happy, who is losing out?
Consider that competitor stores were usually more profit-oriented, which was usually also the reason they failed.
It was a planned update since long before. Just a coincidence in timelines.
They might've pushed it from beta to stable reactively, but an improvement to startup times was in their beta channel last month: https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4397053?emclan=103...
They released it like a day or two after Epic right? That is quite a coincidence ...
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Good to know. I would have hated if Valve was capable of such optimization in 24h all this time but didn't if it wasn't to answer Epic.
> Ok but why didn't they do it sooner? The Steam client is terrible and there is no excuse for it.
It's bad, but I wouldn't call it terrible.
It does have unresolved annoyances, like how context menus randomly stop working on Linux, and tweaking that setting (whose name I forget) on/off does little to fix them. You have to resort to using Big Picture mode, which is annoying. If they ever fix this, I'd have zero problems with the Steam client.
Mostly though I don't care about the client, I care about the games and they work seamlessly in Linux!
Most likely nobody complained and startup time isn't an important metric for them. The typical user may have Steam launch at startup or launch it once after booting their PC and then leave it running for days or weeks.
Personally, my longest and loudest complaint with steam is reliably putting a long hold on inputs when it starts up. If I launch steam on startup then I can't start doing anything else until it's done because it will jump on top of everything else when it feels like it. This is a particularly bad sin because this behavior is a way for credentials to leak.
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I can honestly say I haven’t really had any issues with the client. Sure restoring from tray and starting are slow but other than that it’s been rock solid for me and for something that is mainly hosting a web view it’s nice that it doesn’t eat 1-3GB of memory in the background.
I’m curious what issues you have run into that you consider it terrible?
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Disagree. It does what I need it to do. The store might be slow but my games work great.
I have to say, Epics vibe is just malicious and toxic. Steam is silent and just lets things speak for themselves. What is the value of an idea if it does not work in the real world?
I just wish the people at Epic collectively took some vacation and came back with a less breathing down neck attitude towards everything. Just chill out, relax, it is a browser for searching, buying and downloading games
The messaging from Epic was antagonistic to users and disrespects the efforts the engineers put in to making this new client. "We vibecoded it" minimizes the fact that this almost certainly wasn't a one shot prompt and publish but that real people had to work on and test this before releasing it.
It felt like a message to investors rather than users.
Epic can't even bribe users into using their garbage platform. There are people out there who would rather pay Valve (or GOG) for a game, rather than redeeming the free copy on EGS, that's how pathetic their position is. Of course they have to stoop to stupid publicity stunts like this
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Agreed, their entire communication relies on taking jabs at "the other guy". Just make a good product.
If you need to tell people you're better than someone, you probably aren't.
Valve can rely on their community to be malicious and toxic - for example, the post we're commenting under!
Thank you Epic for improving Steam! Appreciated
> No Discussion forums and community hubs
> No User-written text reviews
> No Community-created guides and walkthroughs
>No Screenshot, clip, and artwork sharing
I can’t believe they don’t have the resource to bring these features to their launcher, they actively refuse to make it a tool for communities.
It must be a way to buy game and launch them, that’s all. Don’t talk, don’t give your opinion on the game, don’t help others in forums,..
I managed to stay away from epic even when they locked games from steam, glad I did. It’s embarrassing.
All of these require moderation which you can't vibecode your way out of
> All of these require moderation
Kinda funny to say in a conversation including Steam.
Epic is so bad that I rather pay for a game on Steam than getting it for free on their store.
So it's a D-measuring contest now? Also, I found the tone of the writing on that site, including the picture of Gabe Newell, kind of obnoxious.
It's an AI meme site. They don't do real reporting. That's why their source of how long it takes to open Steam is a single out of context clip with no comparison to anything else
Absolutely bonkers to brag about your app taking 5 _entire_ seconds to start...
Especially when in reality, a warm start with no updates -- i.e. an absolutely unrealistic scenario -- takes 5 seconds just to show the "loading" screen. And 25 more seconds till everything has finished loading and you can interact with the client.
(measured this on the old laptop I use to play the just-released Order of the sinking star)
(the 420 ms to _restore from the tray_ is even crazier -- I remember Firefox used to do warm starts in ~800 ms 20 years ago)
When you vibe code and tell your agent to "keep working till everything loads inside 100 milliseconds", you end up with a super hideous codebase which does insane things like having a custom memory allocator, handwritten assembly, etc etc.
It is fast though!
what's wrong with any of these things though, both custom memory allocators and handwritten assembly have their place
do you really care if it's working and it's reliable? (i.e. not an overfit to the current data)
App to launch apps is loading in little over 5s, on what I assume is high-end gaming pc.
Truly something to be proud of..
A decent nvme ssd can read ~35GB of data in 5 seconds for reference.
Or you can download 66MB of data on a 100mbit/s internet connection in 5 seconds.
Say you need to load 1gb from disk and need to download 1MB of data from internet. It should take ~75 milliseconds to do that.
It is incredibly slow, considering Valve is a billion dollar company. This level of optimization is closer to what you would expect from a person who is programming as a hobby.
Yes, exactly why I'm making that (potentially harsh) statement.
It really shouldn't take much more than that, most of what you see there is already pre-loaded on disk (I'd hope) like your most recent plays etc, much of it can be cached and rendered directly from that cache, even progressive loading of store images should make it a very, very tiny download from the web.
That should've loaded instantly.
Epic will do anything to beat Valve, apart from actually being better than Valve
Epic Games seems desperate in its attempts to make gamers like AI.
I had suspected that they simply invoked client ready faster and let misc information fetch in background. After a little bit of reversing they did infact just make the client spawn earlier.
Steam client was always fast, majority of load time is (and forever will be) network speed.
Not that it's specifically relevant to this but it's bloody terrible that we need any launcher at all. A whole generation is barely even aware that you used to able to buy and play a game without an online middleman sitting on your computer.
Not only that, a lot of "gamers" refuse to play games that are not on Steam (not only talking about stuff like EGS-exclusives but games that have their own launcher or just EXE's).
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> Your country is not allowed to access this resource
What’s the issue they have with South Africa?
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Epic Games doesn't even have reviews for games, I don't know how they expect to be taken as a serious competitor to Steam, and I'm all for competition for the record.
Both take way too long because of all that electron bloat. I miss being able to load a small app in under 1s. Everything has telemetry or online verification/updating now.
Steam client and the Steam webpage still feels like it was stuck in the very early 2000s. Just look at the page source. Ridiculous. Maybe with AI they can finally replace both of those crapmountains.
No proper gallery, terrible video viewing experience. Broadcast live right into your face. I mean they don't swim in pools of money, they can't afford it. The cabals are so busy.... and of course Gabe Newell needs all the money for his shiny brain interface startup :D.
And that's why having some competition is useful for consumers. I would like to see this trend to continue and game launchers improving not only startup times, but RAM usage and disk size usage. I just looked into my `.steam` directory, and it is taking up over 10GB of disk size, and I have only single game installed, that is only about 500MB in size.
Now patiently waiting for GOG answer to this competition.
I don't think this is a statement about competition. This is not a metric anyone has competed on so far, it's being made into a press release.
What are the possibilities of AI learning how to code efficient apps, e.g. low memory apps, or faster apps, or both? I feel like that is the kind of cheap work that requires too much intelligence for humans, yet provides immense benefits to users.
Just recently I learned Listary has a new beta written in Rust. It is fast! The previous one kept crashing. Asking AI to code Rust style, is probably a shortcut method.
I think vibe coding will force everyone to stay on their toes and keep being at the edge, moat defences have lowered and competition is up, as consumers we will get much better products for much cheaper. Let's just hope there is enough people left with jobs to pay for the services and the others can re-invent theirselves in a career that is still valuable in an LLM world.
There are broken windows everywhere I look when people are using AI, including the launcher. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory even with large companies the acceptance of small issues here and there is concerning.
Oh my god I never drew the link between broken windows theory and AI but it perfectly describes the overall lowering of standards
Does “ai assisted” count as an architecture?
That table has classic "arbitrary LLM comparison" smell.
Honestly, I have no idea what business Steam has starting for whopping 5 seconds as it is right now (after the 'speedup').
It is a simple shell for launching already downloaded apps. This is disgrace and nothing to boast about, especially considering Valve takes 30% cut of basically PC gaming marked for making it.
It's way more than this. Some may argue about how useful all of these features are, but Steam client is also a store (with lots of personalizations), a social network (forums, text and voice chat, personal profiles etc), a mod hosting platform, a game review site, a digital marketplace (cards and items. You may be surprised how popular this aspect is). It also does the controller remapping, manages cloud saves and screenshots/videos, allows to store games at several locations at ones. It provides games related news, checks for updates on all of the installed games.
Again, one may argue how useful all of this is, but it is there, and most users likely have the app on a OS startup anyway.
Why would features like cloud saves cause startup time to be long. That shouldn't be in the critical path.
None of the is loaded on startup. It takes additional time to load any of those features after 5 seconds of starting up.
E.g. it checks integrity of ALL resources on each start. You could break/remove ~any file from install folder, as long as you have intact entry binary (steam.exe) it'll start and fix everything.
That's likely really useful against bit rot / corruption due to unstable overclock (XMP / EXPO profiles come with no guarantee of stability).
Unlike nearly every other platform that takes a 30% cut, you're not forced to distribute on Steam.
> CEF
Ah that's the reason why they came up with an instant speedup. Optimising CEF is basically like docking a zero from your speedup loop [1]
[^1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop
They're posting this as some kind of gotcha against AI, as if Valve aren't using AI too.
Wow this is really the unthinking man's blog post. This is a known slop news site and HN should not allow it here. I like Steam, but at least Epic actually gave a comparison that we can interpret as two load times on the same PC. These metrics are completely useless without that.
Somebody clipping how long it takes Steam to open on their computer with no other context is pretty meaningless. For all we know, it's running slower on their computer today. There's no before/after, no comparison to Epic. Yet this article just confidently asserted the figure as universal. Moronic.
Oct 13 source: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/593110/view/71003705...
I've been using Rare for a couple of years, never had a problem. It's much more lightweight and fast.
https://github.com/RareDevs/Rare
It's such a ridiculous metric to compare on.
My games desktop machine has Steam starting on boot. I literally never quit it. I could not give a single toss how long it takes to start.
I wish Steam had a minimalist setting that only shows a list of games, with menus being available from a right click.
Next let's review their RAM usage while idle, shall we?
If this is the start of epic competing on features and quality for both devs and players instead of just buying up exclusive rights then I'm all for it
I think it's more amazing they ever advertised with 'cold start to store' of 5.4 seconds. How is that anywhere near good?!
Valve: “thank God we are paying (checks notes) hundreds of thousands to be .5 seconds faster on a desktop app boot. Let’s push out the marketing material!”
that is great and all but why was it slow previously
epic games can build a launcher that has hard coded bytes and runs on it's own localized cpu space and I would still use steam
on the flipside, it takes longer to start the steam client than it does to load and start the first level in half life
Not sure why this is even a comparison. Steam Client has been optimized over years of development and updates.
I don't know why anyone's assuming Valve isn't "vibe coding" too.
The 'vibe coded' part needs to go. Both teams likely used AI-assisted coding. Neither team's product was completed by robots, not with current tech. Epic had the launcher update ready in advance to handle the bad PR from their announcement. Prepare for more announcements from Epic how AI and not humans solved something.
The industry is trying to sanitize this term to be synonymous with AI-assisted coding and I hate it. They are trying to blur the lines between skilled engineers who use AI, and everyone else.
The problem with advertising "vibe coding" is that anyone can do it.
Turns out competition works!
It may be faster than Epic, but it is still unreasonably slow for something that really does very little at the end of the day. It's quite tragic that the company that brought us Proton and Windows games on Linux at near equal performance can't do a better job with the client or can't be bothered to improve it. That, and the decades old bugs in Half Life, Left 4 Dead and other classic games that probably still generate not insignificant revenue.
How about actually testing both launchers on same device or at least give startup numbers of steam before/after update? So annoyed by this "comparison" honestly.
This website is just reddit at this point. No one reads the article, no one cares about what is actually true , everyone is just giving their own anecdotes about some random shit.
This article is completely worthless and contains zero useful information, no conclusions about anything can be derived from it.
From my own testing the Epic launcher is still significantly faster than steam at launch, but I do not know if I have gotten the update or if its on a beta branch.
Presumably people here understand how software profiling or whatever works, why can no one here see how obviously nonsensical the reporting here is.
Indeed. Steam updates every time I open it. When visiting family with slower internet that 100MB+ update takes a while just to download.
First real-world evidence that AI is improving productivity?
I bet they just removed a wait(5s) from their client :D
No, that's Microsoft's approach.
Like when they made two generations of XBox consoles boot 5 seconds faster by making the unskippable boot animation 5 seconds shorter. Many years after the exact same issue bottlenecked Windows 7 boot times on SSDs.
Wake me up when it stops going blank when I have two monitors with different scaling factors. [1]
1: https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/4299321840544...
I really hate all these gaming related wars. I liked it better when arguing about stuff like this was regarded as juvenile. It’s a sign of our times I guess, grown men so withdrawn from the system that these sort of battles are front and center to a lot of them.
This is a garbage article, lmao. Comparing architectures as "AI assisted (vibe coded)" and "Optimized modular CEF", and highlighting Steam as being faster in tray restore when it is slower.
Great. Now make it not need a constantly running process, and not using GB of memory when I forget to close it. May not be a big deal on a desktop, but on a laptop having this kind of bloat is obnoxious.
They would have to rewrite the app and use Tauri/WebView2 or native code. CEF blows up your memory use because you ship a whole ass Chromium browser.
You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though. It's just how they work, you need to keep track of play time and respond to any API calls from the game. But it could be a native background daemon instead of two Steam Web Helpers.
> You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though
I disagree. I get that steam has useful features I want while in-game (e.g. invite a friend to play), but there's no reason it couldn't just run this launcher only when a steam game is running and immediately exit once it's done.
Also, I think a lot of people forget how small well written software can be -- we're talking like single or double digit megabytes. Heck there's a whole linux distro that's under 20mb.
> They would have to rewrite the app and use Tauri/WebView2 or native code. CEF blows up your memory use because you ship a whole ass Chromium browser.
The only benefits of Tauri are the smaller application package and the fact that the runtime is always up to date (which can also be a downside). That full package doesn't live in RAM when it's running, so it's "merely" wasted disk space and not RAM. In terms of RAM it uses just as much as electron or CEF.
Can we stop putting Chrome in everything? Why does it take billions of instructions and hundreds of thousands to billions of bytes of RAM to display some text and pictures?
Fair question, but there is a decent answer. It's because Steam is an app that is shipped to 3 platforms and at least 2 architectures; the web platform is a platform- and architecture-agnostic target; and there is an extremely large set of tools and large developer pool to pull from. It may not be the set of you trade-offs you would have chosen, but it's also a reasonable choice for the problem they are tackling with the set of real-world constraints they are presented with.
That's a long solved problem, with dozens of widget engines that have supported cross-platform development for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_widget_toolkits
There's also cross-platform VMs, like Java and Mono.
Ok so they can write it for Windows only then tell Claude to convert it. Even back then, the thing's only job was downloading and running games.
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Public shaming works.
Totally unsurprising
Issue: valve announced the beta steam client was finally 64bits clean and nope it cannot start games if you remove 32bits support since their "reaper" command is still 32bits....
Unless I missed something? Yeah? Anyone to enlighten me?
its funny people complain on steam while they use ultra slow office or teams or windows everyday thats bloated with zillion shit no one asked, I think things should be optional, I have steelseries headphones and their drivers are shit so thank god there is open source alternative only two megabytes and does everything I need. Discord is total shit of an app I will never ever use. etc etc, steam is not super but I had zero issues last 20 years, it just works, sharing, recording, streaming, voicechat, russians took my steam completly and I was able to restore it with ease. Steam is absolute champion.
It is incredibly funny that Steam could have fixed this at any time, but didn't prioritise doing so until Epic openly challenged them. This is why we can't have nice things™
At the end of the day, software speed wars are a good thing for the end users.
They are both terrible.
The old Steam native UI is better.
The best UI I've ever seen is the 2MB Spotify by Ludvig Strigeus (author of µTorrent, @ludde on HN). Instant open, instant play!
"avoid stealing focus..."
oh fucking hell, finally. thank you.
Welcome. Sadly right now the initial activation (when UI appears) can still be a noticeable time after process launch, and thus still feel a bit like a focus steal, but hopefully there will be improvements there soon.
Epic Games, Inc. owns the RAD Debugger source code yet instead of pointing the clanker (and/or their human(s)!!) at it and saying hey go make a instantaneously-launching high-performance modern library/storefront application based on that, instead they vibecoded up yet another Modern Web Stack travesty that still takes plural seconds to launch—and they have the gall to brag about it as though this is some kind of massive achievement?!
Like, awesome, at least the freaking game launcher/storefront experience is no longer an Unreal Engine game—great work guys, huge improvement, now it's not a total shitshow of unimaginable ineptitude, just a regular, run-of-the-mill shitshow. But that's hardly worth patting yourselves on the back about!
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Nobody asked for this! We just want more, better and cheaper games! That's it. I could care less how quick it takes to launch an app which then stays open for hours/days.
>I could care less
borderline murderous eyetwitch
I was in my 30s before I understood that people say "could care less" when they mean "couldn't care less." I'll never understand how people can say it without wanting to claw out their larynx as badly as it makes me want to claw out my eardrums, but I'm gradually learning acceptance -- and how not to let my horror show on my face.
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I think probably some people asked for this, but they're just not you.
Nobody asked for this!
This feels like a strange argument given site we are on. "Why are applications so slow and bloated these days" has been a pretty constant complaint around here for many, many years.
Do you really think that the developers in charge of maintaining the client have absolutely anything to do with 'more, better and cheaper games'?
How are you twisting more efficient software into a bad thing?