Link: https://www.eteknix.com/epic-games-bragged-about-beating-steams-boot-times-so-valve-dropped-a-patch/

Without any flashy marketing campaigns or social media fanfare, Valve rolled out a routine Steam Client update containing a very simple line in the patch notes: “Improved Steam Client startup performance.”

"Reduced artificial delays by half"

I open steam exactly once, then never again until I restart my computer. Why would this even matter.

How will my splines get reticulated?

Patch notes: "we didn't think anyone really gave a shit, but fuck epic"

- sleep(100)

+ sleep(50)

As much as I dislike Epic, it’s good that they’re at least trying to compete with Valve. Forces them to actually get out patches like that.

It’s vibe coded, and what they actually need to do is build up their features

Public relations, pride, vengeance?

Companies often take actions which don't directly improve the product for customers but instead offer benefits to the company. Typing that out in 2026 is... It's nice that it isn't pure enshittification for once.

You may think this is a joke, but people will start complaining if a program is too fast.

I'm sure it happens, but in 25 years I've never had a client complain about anything being too fast.

We have some of this, but it's usually to ensure that some system or hardware is available.

We're a kiosk app on android so get started automatically on boot, and sometimes storage isn't available so we have to delay before loading our config or we get errors.

Oh no, I have to wait a whole 5 extra seconds

Completely irrelevant ofc that the Steam Client is much more than a glorified game shortcut collection with a shop.

You never boot your computer until you reboot it either, yet if it took 10+ minutes to boot like a PC would many years ago, you'd complain.

More performance is almost always more better, unless you're on embedded devices where binary sizes matter, but for us on desktops with comparatively abundant resources, why moan about a free improvement?

They are each bloatware that insists upon itself.

If Steam had not acquired a userbase by vendor lock-in it would be no more popular than any other "game launcher".

As spotted by reports from RespawnFirst and testing shared on X by user @girlglock_, the updated Steam client now completes a cold boot in just 5.23 seconds on comparable test hardware. That shaves nearly five seconds off the previous figure Epic used in its comparison charts, and edges past the 5.47-second benchmark set by Epic’s new AI-assisted preview build.

They both still start too slowly, 5s to open an application on SSD is slow.

Steam has been working on start up time for a while now, in September they started updating it for the Seam Machine and Big Picture mode, but the whole thing got faster. I'm pretty sure this has been in the beta client for a month, so it seems stupid that Epic would go with such a strong marketing push about how slow steam is on something steam is actively improving.

My best guess is they thought they could put this out while technically true and look good, and nobody would notice when Steam shipped this? Just weird marketing.

Indeed. Steam client is an Electron app that can display advertisements, too.

https://i.imgur.com/08dhZb5.mp4

Some people get stuck on performance numbers that don't matter. Like Linux users that say they want 5second boot time instead of 8. Why? Or a sorts car owner that never does track days but likes to tell you their car can do 240km/h...when we have 120km/h road limits.

It depends if it's a free improvement or not. If this improved time to open the window at the cost of deferring loading some important functionality it might be a net loss for example

I actually kinda hate that steam is always running.

I get the reasons why, but I would rather just have like a steam updater daemon than the full app running, and would also prefer that Steam starts quickly unless you catch it during the daemon's start up.

The other use case is for HTPC I do not like Big Picture mode as my "home" experience. If you open Steam with game scope it goes into big picture automatically, so it's designed for Steam Machine experiences and not HTPC. The new screensaver feature (which is in beta, so should improve) uses a lot of GPU and polls CPU frequently, so it's actually a bit annoying to have running. I would rather use a more native launcher than the Big Picture mode experience, so you end up having to watch the opening animation frequently to mask the slow startup.

Again, this is pretty mild, and I don't think even PS5 provides a large improvement.

Thankfully, the only company that I believe has ever made an attempt to make something load faster by making it functionally worse is Microsoft with Windows Fast-Startup.

"Ah yes, I know how to make their OS load faster... We'll just never shut it down!" - That's Microsoft-tier intelligence right there.

No, I do not believe that Valve would make their storefront worse in any sense just to beat Epic Games; they frankly couldn't give less of a shit, because they know that the EGL is not competition.

Your link isn't working for me

Because they feel like (from their perspective) complex operations should require "effort" by the system and program so that they appear heavy and meaningful?

Somebody thought they Kobayashi Maru'd performance optimization

Epic: I Feel Bad For You

Valve: I Don't Think About You At All

These changes have to go through QA and beta builds before they go live. I suppose it's possible it was fast tracked but I'm not convinced steam was even aware they were "racing" in this ignorant benchmark epic published.

Have you tried small mode? It's a built-in option.

https://www.howtogeek.com/694531/how-to-reduce-steams-ram-usage-from-400-mb-to-60-mb/

https://www.xbitlabs.com/blog/mini-steam/

(The instructions are Windows-centric, but the process is pretty much the same on Linux I think. You can figure it out)

Their sales alone would make them just as popular.

The free games are keeping Epic's launcher remotely relevant.

TIL, no I haven’t tried it, and I’ll have to see how it works out

If I can run that as a background thing and open games directly it would be a nice experience

I haven't really messed with it, only tried it once to see if the command worked and it did

that thought makes it kinda neater that the timing would match up.

Or a sorts car owner that never does track days but likes to tell you their car can do 240km/h...when we have 120km/h road limits.

Yeah, but to be fair that V10 Lamborghini Huracán can get up to that speed limit much more quickly than my budget-sports-car Scion tC can. Besides, how are we supposed to know how small their penis is unless they rev their engine up so loud it hurts everyone’s ears?

The Steam client uses CEF not Electron (which also uses CEF), not that the distinction is very important

Boasting about some improvement being vibe coded is such a confusing disconnect for me. There are so many layers of transparent shit that I cannot see through it.

People dislike epic game launcher for so many reasons. The launch time is something I've never considered important.

The "look how much better we are than X" makes you seem like douchebag. They, don't seem to grasp it, or they will wouldn't boast, and that makes it even worse. Then they admit that it was vibe coded. Why? I become immediately suspicious of the change being done carelessly, isn't properly QA tested, and indicative of a shitty state to begin with. I wasn't going to install the epic launcher on Linux, but now I'm even less likely to do so.

Epic needs to boot faster because it gets closed. Drain on data having that shit open and it fucks with my already shit internet.

People that insist that steam is good in any way are either never seen any other program or lying to themselves, it's a horrible mess with a million pages that forces you to use itself because who knows why.

I've had it where my Linux machine boos too fast and I see a red mark fly by in the sea of green check marks. So then I have to go check boot log because display was too fast to read on startup

Honestly, my biggest issue with gaming on linux is that every damn launcher copies steam's format - I want a (non vibe-coded) launcher that just makes a desktop file with a proper icon, and has a launch command.

I dont want the launcher to insert itself into the command, I want it to build the command I would use myself if I decided to delete the launcher.

Not sure why that's so hard, its not like the launcher is actually needed for a game to launch.

You guys are restarting your computers?

As pathetic as Epic is, this is a strong demonstration of why monopolies are bad and competition is needed.

Their vibe code lead to an improvement to what we actually use, so it's a win.

Huh, I guess competition is good for motivating improvement. Even when you're competing against the kid that eats paste.

Tim Sweeny: "Is there anything we are better at than steam? Literally anything? I will take anything we can market, no matter how pathetic and desperate it seems."

https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/710037059469839721

The actual update post from Valve. Why is it not linked in the article? The notes are huge, with many things improved. Off course one of the improvements would probably lead to better loading times. This isn't a response to Epic Games, this is a main update developed way before.

I'm pretty sure this no longer works. The minigameslist is no longer available and almost all components are implemented using CEF

Edit: wait wait wait is small mode back??

Edit 2: apparently it was never gone and I'm just stupid lol

I'm with you on this. I've been rather annoyed with watching steam constantly needing to re-download 500 MB of whatever the hell randomly and I run a lot of computers that restart often (benchmarking shitty PCS is kind of a hobby for me).

I'm glad someone called them out and I'm glad that they responded by improving their software and in record time packing it into the next regular release.

This whole thing looks like the market acting like it should when there is at least a tiny modicum of competition. Just wish the competition was healthier and more vibrant. And less Epic.

He was recently quoted in an article saying that in order to be successful, games need to launch on the Steam platform.

Going forward we optimize for "restore from system tray" time. That'll be a game changer.

It might launch in negative time for all I care, but when I scroll down and it takes 30 seconds to load a fucking 128px PNG of the box art... Yeah sorry still useless.