Epic said its game launcher was faster than Steam on the same day Steam got a speed boost—so I've put both to the test

Catching a glimpse of my screen is often a stressful experience for my colleagues. Besides my mess of desktop icons and all the browser tabs I have open at any given time, you don't want to know how many things I have set to launch on startup. Among these are, of course, the Steam and Epic Games Store clients and let me tell ya, not all launchers are created equal.

Earlier this week, Epic shared on X that it had "vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher to be faster than the other guy." On the same day, Valve released a Steam Client update that "Improved Steam Client startup performance." Well, there's only one thing for it: I've got to benchmark these bad boys to determine once and for all whose launcher is actually faster.

For my basic benchmarks, I timed how quickly each client loaded into their respective storefronts (with all images displaying properly) after I opened them from the …