cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53186894

As much as I like steam, this perfectly demonstrate how great competition is to improve stuff.

Now if only they would stop shooting themselves...

If they did a day early, it's probably not to beat the competition though

With how fast steam deployed this change, it had to have already been in the works for a while (dev time, testing, etc.). The only reason the Steam startup performance improvements are even news is that Epic decided to throw away more of what little credibility they have left to try to make Valve look bad, and failed enormously. Vibe coding isn't competition; it's lazy and a mistake.

Fuck Epic, let them shoot themselves until they die.

Not excusing Epic here, but TBH Steam was pretty bloated. It still is. Valve got too complacent with it.

I’d really rather not have to run a ton of CPU/GPU/RAM-sapping churn in the background just to run a game. And if I do, at least make it leaner when minimized, not a full browser + a ton of other stuff.

This reminds me of when Samsung kept taking potshots at Apple in their marketing and Apple just ignored it while the iPhone continued to be massively popular. It's like a one-sided "please acknowledge me!" rivalry.

(I still hate Apple btw)

Don't forget to add that then Samsung copied everything they can from Apple i think right in the next generation.

The funniest thing here is that a company that has been making software for more 30 years had to rely on automated tool to make a piece of software their programmers couldn't make.

Steam is barely competing, the update come before the Epic boast. Valve is really just doing their own thing.

So i actually tried and timed my steam startup in CachyOS, it's about 5.9sec. Wanna know how Epic Launcher stack up? 2.9sec. Am kinda surprised at how fast it start up, but then i play around a bit and realise it's still as barebone as the old launcher, of course it's able to launch that fast. The real challenge they now have to face is to add features into the launcher and have it still launch as fast.

As for whether the game able to launch or not, i've yet to try, but i assume they'll just use Proton as their compatibility layer.

Sounds like you need more RAM dog

I have 128GB. For my setup specifically, I'm more worried about background CPU/GPU usage causing hitches.

But we are in a RAM apocalypse, so people running games with barely enough RAM/VRAM will be fairly common these days.

If you're ok to reduce the steam client to only a list of your games and sacrifice some features:

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

As a programmer myself, I may be a bit biased, but there is little in this world that I'm more sure about than: this wasn't the programmers' fault. It was the management's fault. The management didn't let them improve it. And it was the management who made them use slop machines. The managers probably even thought in terms of "our coders can't fix this" all while tying the developers' hands. And it's very likely that "our coders can't fix this" was a huge part of their fucked-up rationale for forcing their developers to vibe code. But coders know how to code. Making things faster is their bread and butter. Or at least would be if the managers didn't stand in their way.

There's a certain belief among a lot of coders that a rewrite from scratch is never a good approach. "Don't rewrite, refactor." Take it in little chunks and ship-of-theseus your legacy spaghetti code nightmare into something that meets at least some reasonable standard of acceptable quality. They're not wrong per se, but I've many times made impassioned arguments to the contrary. Not because I don't think the "refactor" approach is better in an ideal world, but because our world isn't an ideal one and a rewrite from scratch is a vastly easier sell to a manager than "please can I take just apportion a tiny bit of my time to pay off a little tech debt?" If your dogma is "never rewrite, only refactor", your codebases will be a hopeless mess forever because the refactor never comes. Managers have egos, and a manager wants to have their name associated with "shiny new application" more than "a bunch of boring invisible grunt-work". (Which may not be boring to developers at all, but is boring to higher-up managers and business analysts.) But in this world of AI-psychosis-boggled CTOs, the calculus has changed. The C-levels are even more inclined to want a rewrite, but this time they want to either cut the developers out of the process completely or at least force them into the role of reverse centaur. It's a much dicier proposition these days to propose a rewrite.

I get that sometimes when people say "developers" or "programmers" (especially with video games), they really mean "the development studio" including management, level designers, artists, BSAs, etc. But it's an unfortunate trend.

In summary, tech workers need to unionize STAT. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk ramble.

Nice, my current machine can’t even handle that much, lol

My system works for what I need it for, but I can’t wait to upgrade hardcore once all of the bubble implodes and all of the tech fabs need consumers again.

Have you been watching epic store since it came out?? They don't have programmers. There's no way. Which is, I think, the issue.

It's not just bloated, it has a bunch of semi abandoned features and relatively simple bugs that they just don't care about fixing. Which is super weird. And I LIKE maximalism and features.

And as absolutely true as this post is, I also feel like this was a little corporate BM from valve. Which is concerning, given their position in the market; I don't want valve to turn into a machine that punches down. That's super toxic culture.

• 1 for unions in it

So, for steam this was actually available from the 9th of september in a Beta version of the client. And wasnt exactly pushed out as an update to spite epic, it is just part of a much bigger and more interesting update.

Can read the patch notes here - https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/710037059469839721

Just to clarify, because I have seen a lot of people not know this. This is part of a much bigger update, and has been in the public beta branch since the 9th of september. Steam aren't "punching down" or doing "corporate BM" in this case.

Epic fail!

TBH I just run GoG or other DRM free games where I can. No launcher needed, no problem.

Indeed.

TBH I felt like I’d get downvoted for saying this. Steam shouldn’t get a “pass” for being a bloated launcher that has to run in the background. Which it is, even with this trimming.

It was probably more simple: it wasn't important.

Faster startup doesn't make you more money. Faster startup is a non-issue if you start on windows login. Faster startup would make people think they can close your app since it is easy to start back up. Faster startup costs time that developers could be spending on things to make you more money. Faster startup costs EA money and reduces income.

Thing is, I still use the old Epic store. Yesterday I clicked the Store tab, and it opened it in a web browser. Twice. Only on the third attempt did it open in the actual application. This was before vibe coding got anywhere near it.

Could well have been a case of a programmer going "why is it so slow to open... Oh, it's trying to access a URL that hasn't been available for 6 years and timing out."

In this economy?