Not only players are aware of the poor state of the Epic Games Launcher. Even the employees are in the know. One of them commented on this in an interview and explained how the future of the store should look.
What did the employee say? Steve Allison, the Vice President of Epic Games, spoke in an interview with Eurogamer on their website about the current state of their game launcher and the improvements they want to implement by mid this year.
He explains that Epic has a lot to do this year, and one of the main tasks is: “The sucking launcher.” According to him: “Is it really slow” and: “We have some things that we need to fix.”
Work on the architectural part of the game launcher is said to have already started in November 2025. Therefore, the first improvements are expected to appear around May or June 2026.
Players should be excited because Allison said: “The launcher should then start to feel good and become faster.”
If you are still looking for hardware to play games from your Epic library, take a look at the Steam Machine and see what the upcoming cube PC can do:
Social features and performance improvements are the focus
What new features are expected? In addition to general performance improvements, basic functions that other platforms already have will also come to the Epic Games Launcher.
Among them, foremost chat and messaging functions, because according to the Vice President, Epic has no framework for such social features, in contrast to other platforms like Steam. This is also not the first time that Allison has mentioned the competitor Steam and talked about his relationship with it. Some time ago, he already noted that Epic would not rejoice at Steam’s demise.
Now Epic wants to introduce so-called community spaces. In these, players should be able to choose avatars, communicate with each other, set up player profiles, and send private messages across platforms. A voice chat is also planned and should appear alongside the other functions in the second quarter of this year.
Why now? The question of why basic features are being integrated so late is obvious. The Vice President gives some hints in the interview for possible reasons.
He admits that they removed communication options during the coronavirus pandemic over the Epic Game Launcher and never brought them back.
Another problem was the two-sided marketplace of the company, which was supposed to host developers and players in one place. He says that Epic has focused on developers and their tools for a long time. However, they should have now started investing more resources into player experiences. Also, the company has been luring with a feature that should attract many gamers to the platform for years: A major competitor of Steam has been luring players for years with free games, has trained them perfectly: “I set an alarm”
