If you’ve been developing using Unreal Engine, claiming free apps off the Fab marketplace or of course, have been purchasing or claiming free games off the Epic Game Store you have probably come to the same conclusion as many… the Epic Game Launcher SUCKS. Thankfully, even Epic Games admit this and are finally taking the steps and spending the resources to rectify this situation.
In an exceptionally candid and blunt interview with Eurogamer, Epic Game Store VP and GM made the following statements about the state of the Epic store:
“We have a lot of things we need to fix,” admitted Epic Games Store vice president and general manager Steven Allison said, during an interview with Eurogamer. “We have needed to fix them for years. We’ve been really focused on developer tooling and all the things we do there. But last year, we finally started to point more of our resources towards player experience stuff, all the things that our players have needed, wanted, and all critics rightfully take us to task on.
“We got a lot of stuff out the door last year, and this year is going to be probably the best year for that stuff on the ‘big rocks’. And the big rocks are: the launcher sucks. Let’s call it what it is. It’s really slow,” he continued.
“It makes calls to our back-end services to refresh every time you click around, and depending on your connection, you’ll have to wait a couple seconds. And that just doesn’t feel good, especially when people are comparing and contrasting and dual using one that doesn’t do that.”
Work on the architecture started in November 2025, he says, and is making “great progress. We’re basically pulling the guts out, putting new guts in.” Those speed improvements should appear for players around May or June, according to Allison, and Epic’s official press release states “this summer”.
“It should start to feel good, be faster and people be like, ‘Holy shit. It doesn’t suck so much.’ And that will be a win for us.”
In addition to this revealing interview, Epic Games also recently released their Epic Game Store 2025 Year in Review ( similar to their Fab Year in Review) with some very revealing statistics released:
Revenue and Engagement
- $400M spent by players on 3rd-party PC games in Epic Games Store (+57%)
- 2.78B Total Third-Party Gameplay Hours (+4%)
- $1.16B spent by PC players on the Epic Games Store (+6%)
- 6.65B Total Store Gameplay Hours (-14%)
- 972M Cross-platform accounts (+8%)
- 317M+ Total PC players
- 78M MAU in December 2025, an all-time record (+6%)
- 67M Average MAU (-1%)
- 31M Average DAU (-2%)
Free Games
- 100 free games offered
- 662M free games claimed
- $2,316 in total value per player
- 78% average score across all free games
Key Links
Epic Game Store Year in Review
Epic Game Store for Developers
It is good to hear that 3rd party developer revenues are up greatly and that the weakest points of the store are being addressed. Monopolies are rarely good for consumers nor developers, so having a viable and developer friendly alternative to Steam is a win all around. You can learn more about Epic admitting Epic Game Store/Game Launcher sucks and what they are going to do about that, in the video below.