The company introduced the project with an unusually blunt joke: “Programming is hard. So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded” the new launcher. That line lands in the middle of Epic’s broader push toward AI-assisted development, but the company says people stayed in charge of the work.
What “vibe coded” meant at Epic
Martin Keely, Epic’s vice president and general manager of the Epic Games Store and Epic Online Services, told The Verge that AI was useful for testing and for replicating the existing launcher’s core functions. He said agents wrote and reviewed the code, while the development team managed and supervised the process.
Keely also said the launcher team had not adopted the “no more hand-written code” approach reported elsewhere at Epic. The project took most of 2026, according to The Verge. Keely described the launcher as evidence of the speed and efficiency Epic expects from AI-assisted development.
The rebuilt app combines the Store, Library and Develop areas in one frame. It adds dedicated pages for games, grid and details views, visual collections, search-as-you-type filtering, an activity feed and a download manager that shows live download, read and write speeds.
Epic is making aggressive performance claims. Its preview site lists a 5.47-second cold start for the new launcher, compared with 10.07 seconds for Steam, and says the Store opens three times faster. Those are Epic’s benchmarks, not independent test results, and the company acknowledges that the preview will have bugs.
Linux arrives before every game does
The launcher runs natively on Linux, with official support for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or newer, Fedora 43 or newer, and Debian 12 or newer. Epic warns that many games in its catalog are still Windows-only and may need a compatibility layer, so installing the launcher does not make every Epic Games Store title a native Linux game.
Fortnite is also not ready for Linux. Epic says it is rebuilding Easy Anti-Cheat and working with Linux distribution maintainers on security requirements. The company plans to bring Fortnite to Linux once the new anti-cheat system works with what it calls a “critical mass” of distro maintainers, then make those improvements available to other developers. The Verge reports that Epic has not set a release date.
For now, Epic recommends that competitive Fortnite and Rocket League players continue using the current launcher. Some social and account-management features are also missing from the preview. Purchases, installed games, cloud saves and progress are tied to users’ Epic accounts and should carry over, according to the company. Epic has not announced when everyone will have to move to the rebuilt app; Keely said the full launch will come when it is stable and has the necessary feature parity.
