Yesterday, Epic Games announced its new vibe-coded store that, despite having none of the features of Steam, still took jabs at Valve’s storefront, primarily by claiming it has a 50 percent faster cold start and a microscopic advantage in restored launches.
But as it turns out, Valve issued an update for Steam that dropped its cold start by some five seconds, meaning the app now launches about at the same rate as Epic Games’ AI-developed counterpart. This means that not even 24 hours before Epic’s reveal, Valve had already shattered the only advantage Epic’s new store supposedly had, which it achieved by heavy AI utilization and being “light on features.”
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As shown in an Oct. 13 client update release, Valve “improved Steam Client startup performance,” which supposedly dropped the cold-start launch times to between five and seven seconds. This is heavily reliant on your own machine, so you might get higher or lower numbers depending on what your configuration is. On my end, it takes around eight seconds overall, which is still 20 percent lower than what Epic Games reported in its announcement.
Users online are sharing their own calculations that clearly show Steam launching within about five seconds, which is on par with Epic Games’ vibe-coded store. This sheds the only supposed pro of the EGS while keeping all of its flaws intact, which include but are not limited to a lack of proper reviews, community tabs, a workshop, guides, a marketplace, forums, discussions, ways to communicate with developers, and so on and so forth.
Incredible, really.
