I used to think vibe coding would get us slow Electron apps but now we got speed wars between game launchers. I hope this comes for all types of software.
With that said, I tested it right now and Steam takes about 2 seconds to restore from tray and 10-15 for cold boot. The new Epic launcher is around 0.5 and 5 like the article mentioned. Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something.
It's nice but a low bar. Steam pioneered crappy Chrome-based desktop apps before Electron existed, which is also why it's so hard to run Steam in Wine. It has a longer startup and shutdown process (they even call it that) than my entire OS.
Epic, EA, etc then made their own similar launchers. Of course all of them also want to launch when Windows boots, update constantly, and not close when you press close.
I would go one step farther - if you're vibe coding, skip Tauri altogether. I've been on-and-off vibecoding a GitKraken replacement using egui instead, and the memory footprint is very low. Otherwise can't tell the difference, as I'm not reading the code either way.
I vibe-coded a paste manager using wails (https://github.com/egeozcan/mahpastes), and I'm currently on linux (bazzite) and I have 0 problems with the rendering.
One of the things I hit is that there is no way to trigger an "open folder" dialog. It gets mapped to "open file" instead. The correct hooks exist in both WebKit and in GTK, but not wired up in WebKitGTK. I think the fix would be quite minor but I looked into what is involved in raising a patch and decided to leave it. There are a lot of minor paper cuts like this.
I did hit a couple of CSS or rendering quirks, but the rendering perf also seemed noticeably poor, and that's harder to live with.
Definitely would concede this, but I haven't had any issues so far. It's been able to make things look exactly as I've dictated them, even with relatively complex visualization of git branching. I get the sense that, with how capable Opus 5.5 is, "less capable" no longer means "not capable enough".
What I meant: they can write it pretty well. Probably because share of good quality code of native apps is much higher bad quality, due to all js slop we had even before LLM slop.
But there’s still no way to get consistent results cross-platform without a web view, right? I guess Tauri isn’t even consistent because it relies on the system’s browser and they do differ to some degree.
My friend, inconsistency is the entire point. You now have incredible power to write truly native apps that fit in with the platform and follow all the standards. The bottleneck is now you, or whoever owns each target platform and understands what native apps feel like.
So I’m supposed to maintain a native app for each platform and try to be sure they’re aligned in every way except visuals? Sounds like a recipe for bad UX if anybody uses more than one of them.
On the contrary: using a web view is the worst possible UX for your users. It's slow, uses a ton of memory, and doesn't integrate well with the desktop. The only reason people ever did it was laziness, not because it produced a better product.
I'd argue that being slow and using a ton of memory has more to do with (very) poorly optimized websites rather than blaming browsers as a whole. Sure, they'll never be as efficient as native, but people put a lot of work into optimizing browsers and most websites are never optimized.
Memory use alone is an interesting case for comparison because websites tend to have a lot more images/videos loaded than other applications. All of those PNGs and JPEGs need to be decompressed before you can paint them to the screen which makes them much larger.
> I'd argue that being slow and using a ton of memory has more to do with (very) poorly optimized websites rather than blaming browsers as a whole.
A web browser is a huge platform. Audio, 2D and 3D graphics, file handling, network requests,... A lot of code while your application needs are tiny. That is wasteful and a security risk.
That's really only argument against shipping a browser with your application. For ordinary websites (or WebViews) that's not really a concern because it is shared and automatically updated.
If you're writing five apps, you're doing it wrong. A huge amount of probably any app can be contained in a common blob of business logic and wiring, with some native presentation on top. Yes, I oversimplify, but folks have been doing exactly that for decades. More work? Yup, even with a common engine it's more work than firing up Electron. That's where "do we even give a shit about what we're shipping?" comes in. If there's no pride in the finished product, well, Electron isn't going to save your product, either.
> A huge amount of probably any app can be contained in a common blob of business logic and wiring, with some native presentation on top.
I keep seeing people claim this, yet most UI software I see really doesn't do anything that complicated. It's some basic database CRUD stuff and some basic algorithms, and then all the actual effort lies in making the UI feel good.
> Yeah the problem is having to write 5 apps, not the inconsistency.
Isn’t that what abstraction and interface is about? You can write the common business logic and presentation concerns, and then share it across each native implementation.
That is what web wrapping is in truth, but it’s just inneficient because of the huge surface area of web technologies.
Aesthetics, usability, and technical flavor are different axes and feel right is a subjective point. And based on anecdata, usability is what actual users want. Web wrapping is mostly an exclusive focus on aesthetics. With native frameworks, you often get very close to "feel right" without much effort.
> With native frameworks, you often get very close to "feel right" without much effort.
I've only seen this sentiment on nerd forums but never among my less technical friends, so I'm a bit reluctant to accept this wisdom honestly. That said, if you're just building something for a technical crowd you'll probably make them much happier if you make your implementation use native widgets and take up much less memory and redraw faster at the expense of a slightly jankier UX. Though, this is probably why IRC clients all feel janky lol.
For example a lot of my less technical friends/family really like the visual design of Spotify even though it conflicts with a lot of design language on MacOS, Windows, and Android.
The hidden reason why so many people are frustrated with 'modern design' that goes unaddressed is that most software nowadays completely ignores the standards of the system it runs on. Every single developer of even the most trivial apps insists that their design language is the most important in the room, which is what brings us to the temptation of using a webapp for everything so every user on every OS sees the exact same thing. It's gotten so bad that the only places I see native system UIs from third parties is either older software or hobbyist projects, but never anything corporate.
Some of that is also that what "native UI" means has shifted a bit. To look at Windows, Win95 had a thoroughly considered UI design that was very well adapted to both what it needed to do and the hard constraints on it. Win11 is... kind of a shitshow. (Are parts of it still from Windows 3.1? I haven't tried to track them down... but in Win10 there were a few dark corners.) It made sense to match the native UI in the Win95 days. It often doesn't now, it's simply not a target worth hitting. You could just use Win32 and target the older Win95 look, but apart from appearance issues, it was designed to work well in 1995, and we simply demand different things from our UIs now. Like support for touchscreens. Old Win32 apps are painful on touchscreens. (But, often, awesome without a mouse.) And those are real considerations, not oooh-shiny-new-thing designer BS.
Yes, modern Windows design is a bit of a mess, caused by both the designer bug of redesigning everything (we have had at least 3 different Windows design languages prevalent over the last 10 years) and Windows having to support extremely old legacy software. The second was almost nonexistent when Windows 95 was designed, they could have a true clean slate, so the comparison isn't as fair. But still, even with the abundance of native UI frameworks, the point holds true that no new software uses any of them, no matter if it's Win32 or WinUI. They could implement them very easily, and some hobbyist software does so, and it looks very native and in-line with the rest of Windows 11, but they choose not to.
And yes, the 3.11 ODBC file selector is still in Windows 11. Praise be to legacy components.
As a user of both windows and mac operating systems, I'd rather the app be consistent between them so I don't have to adopt a different workflow depending on which OS I'm using the app on.
Skia is the 2D graphics library used in Chromium. A number of GUI frameworks (Flutter and Avalonia) directly use Skia to do non-native platform GUIs that are consistent across platforms.
The real reason rewrites to fix tech debt used to fail was that it took too long to get to feature partity & the goal posts moved constantly while you were on the rewrite team.
The sunk cost of existing code is no longer considered in a rewrite.
Maybe it was hard to write in the first place, but it is not hard to rewrite anymore, as long you've got decent tests.
I think in Steam's case it was more like a lack of competitive pressure, their publisher dashboard still packs HTML/CSS fixes for IE6/7/8 that's code they probably haven't touched in ~20 years and it's certainly not because they couldn't afford or lacked time to work on it!
I actually think that vibe coding lends itself well to stuff with really strict type systems. When you use Claude Code, it basically works on a loop until it gets something "right". A type system allows for part of the "right" criteria to be baked into the compilation, giving a hard block if it doesn't at least pass that.
I've had reasonably good luck having Claude generate Rust code that performs well.
The new version of Epic is based on Tauri. Also written in JS and probably React (haven't decompiled it yet) but the web runtime is part of Windows instead of shipped with the app so it takes less disk space and RAM. And you can write perf sensitive code in Rust for even more speedup.
Interesting, I didn't know they moved to a Chromium based desktop application. But honestly, I don't feel like there's any performance issues with the steam desktop client (I'm running it on Fedora, but I'm assuming performance is relatively similar on different platforms).
I'd imagine one can now focus on creating a client for a single OS and having the AI do the porting to others as it would essentially be a translation.
Perhaps it will bring back native apps because supporting other platforms is less laborious.
i don't care how fast it is beyond a certain point. What is more shocking is all the bugs that vibe coding landed epic. I can't imagine shipping software at this scale in this state.
Hopefully LLM models and harnesses improve to where Chromium or Electron apps can be more trivially converted to native apps. You're paying for tokens for downstream compute efficiency across the user base.
They already are. I asked opus 5.5 to plan out and begin building a swift version of my electron notes app, using a similar architecture / feature set. I hut enter and honestly forgot about it. 2 hours later im reading slack while making my next round of coffee, and my session is interrupted by a native app opening on my phone (the model installed it for me to test). It.... has 2/3 of the features already and looks awesome, holy crap. It skipped my suggestion to use the Lexical (web) editor and is.... using. platform native one.
time will tell if it can make it the way i like but.... it can definitely get far. Used 40% of my session limits on my $20/mo sub.
I wonder what best practices here look like at this point. In my world, we've moved past skills for something like this, having porting helper/validator/etc things be harness level is measurably better than what skills look like right now. The open plugin spec is certainly an improvement (namely in packaging and distribution)- but, really you'd be leaving perf on the table if you were not to tune your harness. I wonder if something like dsh, pi, or other extensible (coding) harnesses have something like a concept of "harness as an extension".
> Epic may have “vibe coded” a faster client, but Valve proved that targeted optimization on a decades-old ecosystem can still beat out AI speedruns.
Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI.
I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
Once I had a good benchmark script, Opus 4.8 or whatever made my terminal app faster with less memory than ghostty and kitty. It's not even interesting.
> The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
The dark forest hypothesis is that we can't find any alien life because it's dangerous to broadcast your existence and location to competitors. So rational thing for every alien civilian to do (and arguably for us) is to keep quiet.
It's "sort of" a dark forest problem because admitting you're using AI is socially risky. Indeed, this entire thread is built on the idea that Epic's lazy use of AI has been bested by the savvy & righteous programmers at Valve[1].
So people who think AI is actually a really useful tool and that using it to make your project better will imagine that everyone who makes things better today uses AI at least a little, and assumes they don't talk about it because they don't want to get yelled at. Meanwhile, if you think AI does bad work (or is often used badly) you can ascribe bad software to bad uses of the tool. We can never know for sure because people don't talk about it.
[1] I happen to agree with this dichotomy but that belief precedes AI
Yeah exactly, Valve engineers probably just told AI to make it faster.
Your "dark forest" analogy sounds reasonable but Epic's outright admission of "vibe coding" is a bit of a footgun considering how rabidly anti-AI the folks on sites like Reddit are. If they had just been like, "it's faster and supports Linux" they would be the darling of the internet.
Epic Games wants to make an "AI-first" game, so they need to push "vibe coding" onto the gaming audiences to get them to accept it before they lay off people and ask $69 for a game where the art is made by an AI model.
Code has never been the bottleneck for a skilled engineer, and if you value high quality then you need to spend a lot of time reading over the slop LLMs produce to turn it into something hardened and reliable. So, for a skilled engineer, LLMs have a very marginal benefit in terms of delivery speed.
> I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
This is probably the saddest comment I've read on HN. It really shows the state of this place and how far into psychosis the comments have fallen.
All I can think with this whole situation is how much time is wasted by people getting angry and defensive on behalf of a Valve. It's almost like people have a parasocial relationship with the application itself.
That's not even getting to some of the "missing" features.
No Community marketplace for in-game items
No Direct player-to-player item trading
No Digital trading cards, levelling, and points shop
I hope more application developers "forget" to add these features.
People have wasted their time defending their platform's "honour" for decades. It used to be Sega vs Nintendo. Then it was PlayStation vs XBox. Now it's Steam vs EGS.
Anyway, what are useful features of Steam:
- their dedication to getting Windows games running on Linux (to see off the existential threat Microsoft poses to them, but nonetheless greatly appreciated)
- community forums / screenshots / artwork / guides etc. for every product. Very useful if the game vendor doesn't have its own, and most game vendors don't
- that Steam Sales encourage vendors to offer games at much more reasonable prices (e.g. a few pounds/dollars/etc.) for what is effectively a license, revocable at any time, not a real purchase. £60? Ha ha fuck off, I'm waiting for the sale when it's £5
- also, as far as I've seen, every game distributed can still be downloaded today. People may complain that publishers update a title e.g. to remove licensed music 10 years later... but you can still download the old version with some trickery. And I've never seen Steam actively remove downloads for existing customers, I've only seen games removed from the store so no future customers
- pirates have found that most games, if their only DRM is Steamworks, are incredibly easy to crack. I am very glad Steam has convinced most publishers to use that alone and nothing worse, and I curse publishers who insist on their own DRM, their own launcher, etc. If Valve goes tits-up, I have a lot of confidence most of peoples libraries will still be playable with a little bit of cracking.
There are other useful features, even if Valve is getting rich and fat off selling gambling and day-trading to teenagers.
I think the "fanboyism" of Steam is a bit different to platform wars like PS vs Xbox, etc.
Fundamentally Valve has built up a lot of trust with the gaming community, and other than microtransactions and gambling, I think it's very fair to say they've been a net good for both the PC gaming community; as well as the ecosystem.
Valve have my trust just by being privately held company that can actually plan for decades ahead instead of try to appease major shareholders or black rock.
It took them 10 years to make Linux a competetive gaming platform.
They invested in VR early and still do a lot for this niche market.
They brought back hanfheld PC from being niche chinese devices to being mainstrean and maintain support for Steam Deck for 5 years.
As game developer I do find 30% cut abysmal, but it's not any worse than consoles and I dont like Epic as a gamer for being awfully anti-consumer. I certainly dont want PC game market to be controlled by chinese Tencent subsidiaries.
Getting involved with epic games as a game developer feels like willingly feeding yourself into the mouth of an open shark. Yeah maybe they have a better cut, but I'm still not doing it
Valve rightly get a lot of flak for the gambling and high % cut, but you do get a functional useful service in return at least, that doesn't appear to be actively trying to screw you over
Don't forget big picture mode. Nowadays Steam is a better game console than an actual game console. That's the only way I use it anymore.
...and the hardware ecosystem, too. I just got my Steam controller last week, and it's wonderful. It's so good I'm playing Civ with it. Civ! On a gamepad!
FTFY. Steam forums are a cesspoll most often than not. No, we do not want a easy accessible place where people can spew their crap on the internet. It's either moderated and useful or it shouldn't exists.
Really depends on which game, and yes the forums are moderated by Steam staff, who at least understand the role correctly (internet janitor, not little personal fiefdom)
Without competition Valve would never have bothered making Steam faster. Steam hasn't meaningfully changed in a decade, and feels well out of date. I celebrate Epic forcing Valve to finally make some improvements. Turns out they could do it in a day all along.
They completely rewrote their UI? Do you not remember the old library? The old downloads page? The old big picture mode? You may be suffering from selective memory
I dont care about faster startup times for steam, as long as its under a minute.
If any big company want a good steam alternative we would have it.
Every alternative launcher, uplay/ubisoft connect, origin/ea app, epic games, gog started with a store platform and stopped. Its like the marketing team just looked at the store but not at the rest of the steam features.
I "defend" valve because they're seemingly the only company that cares about the end-user linux experience.
Rocket league used to have a Linux build, then epic decided to kill that off entirely.
I recently bought the steam frame. It's years past when I would have wanted this VR headset the most, but half the reason I bought it was to support Valve's R&D with Linux desktop support, arm JIT translation, etc.
People bitch and moan about "voting with your wallet", then you have a company that tons of people continually vote with their wallet for, then people complain about others defending the one company that doesn't seem to want to screw their userbase over.
Sure Steam has some blind spots for the very sweaty semi-pro gamer. I don't care about virtual stickers and little treats. I care that all my games run on my Linux desktop after years of devs not giving a shit and other companies being openly hostile.
Valves competitors suck. Their VR competitor is Meta which in a just world would not exist as an organization. Their gaming marketplace competitor is Epic, which produces the character-slop extraction shooter and a launcher that gets more annoying to use every time I open it.
The other "competitors" if you can even call them that, are microsoft who has basically deleted a dozen game studios in the last year via moneyball, and other game companies like EA and Ubisoft who routinely delete purchased games and tell the users to go suck it.
Valve is basically the only company out there who is resisting the constant urge to make everything shitty to increase investor profits. They stay private and everyone loves what they do with that power. I'm sure a ton of fail-son PE bros are dying for the chance to buy out valve and turn everything it's ever done to absolute dogshit. We'd be getting half-life 3, 4, 5, 6, mobile, etc and they'd all be shit.
I think the commenter was addressing your initial comment about fanboyism (or more charitably, being fans of) Steam.
People are fans of Steam (of Valve, actually) because Steam has been a boon for the gaming world and for Linux gaming in particular, in a way others (like Epic) haven't. I subscribe to this opinion. I'm just so glad gaming on Linux is mostly seamless now, I simply don't care anymore for which OS a game was built (within reason... but then again, Windows games are not guaranteed to always run on Windows either!).
I do genuinely dislike their game launcher, but also I don't want to have multiple game launchers even if it was working well given it's just overhead.
I'll happily pay to have a game on Steam vs getting it for free on Epic. Steam has been a good experience for me the past 2+ decades :)
I'd love to see governments decouple distribution and production in media - roughly, let any streaming service serve any tv/film, let any game service serve any game ... consumer's choice.
It would be under a 'most-favoured nation' type deal, after an initial launch period (exclusive distribution for 1 year, say) if my distribution service pays the same per-view amount then I can stream/distribute your media regardless of your deals. If a producer/creator makes a work available they are required to allow it on other registered channels (no setup cost beyond actual price of downloading the content).
Essentially make rights holders honour the idea that they'd make works S available if only people would pay.
Refuse to make a work available and you'd get a warning, then it enters the public domain. The copyright deal is "things enter the pubic domain after a limited monopoly to allow recompense", enforce it. So, if eg Netflix/Sony/BBC/etc stop offering their back catalogue then the works enter the public domain.
I wouldnt mind Epic if their platform wasn't so intentionally anti-consumer. I dont have any issues with Epic other products - I dont play Fortnite, but Unreal was net positive for gamedev and Epic also sponsored a lot of open sourcr software including Godot which is nice of them.
Unfortunately literally everything is wrong with EGS specifically.
Their stance on intentionally not having user reviews because consumers shouldn't have power to react to publisher or developers decisions.
Their giving away games for free and then revoking licenses then removing them from accounts even though it was purely their own fault. They were most successful company ever back then and could certainly eat that loss.
Their shitty account system that certainly got hacked multiple times because it's the only gaming platform where someone constantly trying to access my accounts even though I'm Linux and cybersecurity nerd with random 32-char passwords. They also dont have straightforward way to change account region without trying to deal with their shitty support.
Tim Sweeney decided to make a platform to fuck over gamers and we gamers returned favour.
Steam client is INFINITELY faster than Epic client, across those dimensions.
BTW Gaben is my friend and I identify as Dr Gordon Freeman.
/s
Parasocial relationships are a byproduct of the technology you (I assume) and I have and continue to create & roll-out to society, increasing physical distance from actual humans as well as increasing "in the head, only" identity, or identities, that culture carries with itself more and more.
Things nobody has said since like 2005? A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal. Especially when everyone just leaves it running anyway. There's far more significant aspects like memory usage, game library, and general features.
The client is definetly terrible. Slow to start. I have frikkin 2 different topbars that seemingly have similar options. Way to many locations for settings, spammy store page.
Hard to navigate game library. The fact that the store page often is a better look at the game than the one in the library.
Impossible to see what dlcs that is enabled unless you happen to borrow the game from someone in your family. Why van games corrupt and un and reinstalling is the only fix (verifying does sometimes not catch it).
I could go on. Its still the only store with acceptable linux experience sadly.
I agree the client is pretty scuffed, but I don't understand your problems:
> I have frikkin 2 different topbars that seemingly have similar options.
I am not sure exactly what you mean by "top bars" but my two top sets of menus are "Steam View Friends Help" and "STORE LIBRARY COMMUNITY <USERNAME>" which seem quite different.
> The fact that the store page often is a better look at the game than the one in the library.
You can go to the store page from the library! Why would you assume you should re-explain the game to a player? I think reminding you of when you did things in the game makes a lot of sense. I wish it listed playtime and not just achievements.
> Impossible to see what dlcs that is enabled unless you happen to borrow the game from someone in your family.
I do think their DLC display is bad, but it's far from impossible. Properties -> DLC shows you all your DLC and which is enabled. Also clicking on the DLC tab does show you which you own (and all the ones you own will be enabled by default).
Like I said, I think steam has a lot of problems, but I don't understand your complaints at all. I would complain about the awful performance of a webview, the annoying behavior of store pages, the foolishness of the "All" tab on communities that mixes different kinds of content in one place but it will never change because people can't find it otherwise, etc.
"Acceptable" is doing heavy lifting, because if you have a non-us keyboard layout Steam moves heaven and earth to ensure that no matter how hard you work to launch games with US keyboard, they will still use your non-US layout and be broken by default.
> A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal.
When I hear about a game on social media I often want to add it to a wishlist on Steam but I dread opening the app because I know it will take forever to open on MacOS.
I don't mind a game launcher taking time, but the store is a part of that which makes it annoying I avoid the native app for that reason.
It’s been a little while since I used Steam but you used to be able to do that from their own website, I think it was store.steampowered.com (I am guessing the website from memory). My game PC wasn’t my main PC so I didn’t even had Steam on that pc and it was what I used to buy the games - don’t really remember if I wishlist too because I use bookmarks in web browsers and folders for the bookmarks.
The Steam client on macos is the slowest program I've used. I just uninstalled it and use the browser for store/community pages because the steam client is unusable.
I get people hate Epic, but the Steam client is not particularly well made or snappy. And I'd love to see competition kick their asses in to improving it.
A launcher is a parasite mostly used to collect stats. Having it take five seconds before you even get to the point of actually starting to load your game is preposterous. Whereas who cares if it takes five seconds for a store to load? At least I play games more often than buy new ones.
I don't have a MacOS comparison point, but steam for me is pretty equivalent to the numbers in the article. ~10 seconds for a cold start, half a second for a warm start. Unless you have a very different definition of "take forever"? What are you seeing on MacOS?
I tested the latest Steam build on MacOS and it took 7 seconds to load on an M4 Max and I had to close a popup when it opened.
In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever. Same with mobile, if you tapped an app icon and it loaded that slow it would never be tolerated.
> In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever.
But a game client is not a web page. You open it once (some people, on boot) and then it's just sitting there. You don't randomly start it from scratch whenever you run a game...
And even if you did, 7-10 seconds waiting for a game to start is not the same as waiting for a page to load. You can wait for the game.
"You don't randomly start it from scratch whenever you run a game..." Uh, this is exactly what I do. What's so special about an app that launches apps that it needs to be left warm constantly?
m5pro 64gb, 3s to get to the first 'loading window', 5s to get to the store page. But honestly who gives a shit. If you are the average working joe who comes home from work and fires up the pc to play a game, a 5s load of steam is not even a piece of gravel in the road let alone a speed bump. It's not like i'm opening and closing steam 100, 50 or even 5 times a day. It's a useless metric.
I occasionally want to play a little video game after work. The amount of nonsense involved before actually launching the game has deterred me enough that I usually play something not on Steam instead. Like, AssaultCube launches instantly. Even Minecraft with the right launcher is pretty quick.
> In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever.
Given that its primary purposes are to start video games that take anywhere from five to thirty+ seconds to start and to download video games and their patches which range in size between many hundreds of MBs to a hundred+ GBs, the client taking roughly ten seconds to start is no problem.
Optimize where it makes sense, yanno? I'd much rather have to "deal with" the Steam client taking ten seconds to start than to have to deal with the Epic Games Launcher's download rate being limited to 100->150 mbit/s. [0]
[0] Last I checked on this was a few years ago -like twelve months after Sea Of Thieves stopped being widely popular- so it may have improved. The absurdly slow download speeds [1] are one of the bigger reasons why I stopped using EGS.
[1] Sure, many people don't have connections any faster than that. I do. Steam saturates it, and -at the time- EGS absolutely did not and occupied 100% of one logical CPU while failing to do so.
A modern computer runs circles around your 90s computer... if the code was the same, it should be crazy fast. Instead, everything is a web browser, and each of them need to load 1gb of junk into memory each time you click on them.
Startup is one thing, using the program is another. Steamwebhelper, the chromium based tool that renders everything web based in the client is awfully optimized and likes to noticeably utilize the CPU even when minimized on the tray, yet somehow always serves me with a blank page whenever I go store, community etc. on first try, I have to click the label multiple times to get anything. You can't even kill the process, because it's immediately relaunched, I just wish there was an option to disable it and only get the library.
I definitely don't leave the Steam launcher running all the time, on macOS it takes up a non-trivial amount of memory that I want to have available for other apps. I launch Steam when I want to play some games, then quit it when I want to do other stuff.
the steam client is definitely kind of terrible, maybe i’m just biased because i have used steam deck since launch which uses big picture, but there have been bugs in the client that were extremely annoying and obvious that took years to fix (for example, closing a store page and losing page position, but then the page would scroll up when pressing down on a controller for years).
A very obvious non-deck example is how bad it can be at loading and showing videos on the store page. They consistently have issues with smooth playback, this is not my network, others i know have the same issue. it’s to the point that I scroll down and look at gifs in the description for gameplay footage first. I use the discovery queue often and it’s pretty apparent.
When I browse the store, I specifically do it in a browser because the client is so unpleasant to use. For launching games I have no choice. I love Steam as a concept and company, but it is not an enjoyable app to use by its own merits, in my opinion.
it changed from a small, fast native client to webshit quite a few years ago. the performance is acceptable now but it is indeed magnitudes slower. it also steals focus several times during startup which is the single greatest thing a developer of client software can do to be a shithead
I said it back when they first migrated to Electron, and I'll say it again now. It's not the slowest thing ever by modern standards, but it's definitely not fast, either, and is pretty bloated in terms of memory usage.
It only looks good if you compare it to the Epic client, which somehow manages to be much worse.
I definitely don’t leave the resource hog Steam running, because it can be slow and terrible. I turned off Steam Overlay and Notifications to get substantial speed up improvements.
My guess based on the timing is that it is primarily for the Steam Frame. Steam is not just a game launcher but the entire desktop environment for the Steam Machine, the Steam Deck, and anything else like Bazzite that uses it as its primary UI as well. But in those cases, while at scale every second saved is nice, for the most part a second here or there doesn't really amount to that much.
But for the Steam Frame, which is probably booting while it is strapped to your face and completely obscuring your vision, every second is felt much more intensely. Anything that can be done to get to first interaction sooner has a much, much larger effect on the feel of the experience.
The speed would always have been nice to have, but it moves beyond "nice to have" for the Steam Frame case into having a significant effect on how it feels to use and the out-of-box experience. Yes, you'll use sleep most of the time, but when you do a full boot or reboot, you feel the seconds.
It was in the beta channel from some time now being updated and refined, steam is constantly updating the beta channel and promotes updates to general channel every now and then.
From what I can see they actually started pushing the steam update to stable users before the epic tweet. And has been on the beta channel for weeks.
So I wonder if it's the other way round, Epic rushed out the boast because they knew the window that it would be even remotely correct to most users was closing.
If I had a performance improvement ready for release, and my competitor started bragging about being faster, I'd for sure jump at the opportunity to release it sooner.
> Ok but why didn't they do it sooner? The Steam client is terrible and there is no excuse for it.
It's bad, but I wouldn't call it terrible.
It does have unresolved annoyances, like how context menus randomly stop working on Linux, and tweaking that setting (whose name I forget) on/off does little to fix them. You have to resort to using Big Picture mode, which is annoying. If they ever fix this, I'd have zero problems with the Steam client.
Mostly though I don't care about the client, I care about the games and they work seamlessly in Linux!
Most likely nobody complained and startup time isn't an important metric for them. The typical user may have Steam launch at startup or launch it once after booting their PC and then leave it running for days or weeks.
Personally, my longest and loudest complaint with steam is reliably putting a long hold on inputs when it starts up. If I launch steam on startup then I can't start doing anything else until it's done because it will jump on top of everything else when it feels like it. This is a particularly bad sin because this behavior is a way for credentials to leak.
I can honestly say I haven’t really had any issues with the client. Sure restoring from tray and starting are slow but other than that it’s been rock solid for me and for something that is mainly hosting a web view it’s nice that it doesn’t eat 1-3GB of memory in the background.
I’m curious what issues you have run into that you consider it terrible?
This is why software is slow and everything uses 2GB of RAM at idle: because nobody really cares.
I'm sure that AI made this speedup work much easier and quicker; probably just access to the monorepo and a prompt of "make the launcher boot up faster while changing no functionality. Keep track of before/after benchmark numbers" would be fine as long as you can get your co-workers to approve whatever diff gets spat out the end.
But either of these companies, presumably with dev teams of dozens-hundreds of SWEs, could have pointed to one of them 5 years go and said "spend the next 2 months optimizing the performance of the launcher" and would probably have gotten similar results.
I make my software fast and efficient mostly because I enjoy it. Absolutely nothing stopping web apps, Electron, everything else from being efficient, slim, and performant. It's just that the modicum of effort required to set that up was outweighed by the convenience of just importing and parsing the full 16MB icon cache and 13 unused analytics SDKs every pageload and not worrying about it.
> I'm sure that AI made this speedup work much easier and quicker; probably just access to the monorepo and a prompt of "make the launcher boot up faster while changing no functionality. Keep track of before/after benchmark numbers" would be fine as long as you can get your co-workers to approve whatever diff gets spat out the end.
Yup.
So, here's my relevant example of how "vibe coding" doesn't mean "not caring", an isochrone map generator, real time, about the same total download (in a private window) as Google maps is when looking at Berlin:
It almost certainly still has bugs. And the code itself is probably terrible, because LLMs don't always clean up when you tell them to remove everything related to a bug.
But it is a download that's 90% data, and does get you a real-time updates as you drag your origin around the largest city in the EU.
I have to say, Epics vibe is just malicious and toxic. Steam is silent and just lets things speak for themselves. What is the value of an idea if it does not work in the real world?
I just wish the people at Epic collectively took some vacation and came back with a less breathing down neck attitude towards everything. Just chill out, relax, it is a browser for searching, buying and downloading games
The messaging from Epic was antagonistic to users and disrespects the efforts the engineers put in to making this new client. "We vibecoded it" minimizes the fact that this almost certainly wasn't a one shot prompt and publish but that real people had to work on and test this before releasing it.
It felt like a message to investors rather than users.
It's an AI meme site. They don't do real reporting. That's why their source of how long it takes to open Steam is a single out of context clip with no comparison to anything else
There are broken windows everywhere I look when people are using AI, including the launcher. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory even with large companies the acceptance of small issues here and there is concerning.
A decent nvme ssd can read ~35GB of data in 5 seconds for reference.
Or you can download 66MB of data on a 100mbit/s internet connection in 5 seconds.
Say you need to load 1gb from disk and need to download 1MB of data from internet. It should take ~75 milliseconds to do that.
It is incredibly slow, considering Valve is a billion dollar company. This level of optimization is closer to what you would expect from a person who is programming as a hobby.
And that's why having some competition is useful for consumers. I would like to see this trend to continue and game launchers improving not only startup times, but RAM usage and disk size usage. I just looked into my `.steam` directory, and it is taking up over 10GB of disk size, and I have only single game installed, that is only about 500MB in size.
Now patiently waiting for GOG answer to this competition.
When you vibe code and tell your agent to "keep working till everything loads inside 100 milliseconds", you end up with a super hideous codebase which does insane things like having a custom memory allocator, handwritten assembly, etc etc.
I had suspected that they simply invoked client ready faster and let misc information fetch in background. After a little bit of reversing they did infact just make the client spawn earlier.
Steam client was always fast, majority of load time is (and forever will be) network speed.
What are the possibilities of AI learning how to code efficient apps, e.g. low memory apps, or faster apps, or both? I feel like that is the kind of cheap work that requires too much intelligence for humans, yet provides immense benefits to users.
Just recently I learned Listary has a new beta written in Rust. It is fast! The previous one kept crashing. Asking AI to code Rust style, is probably a shortcut method.
I think vibe coding will force everyone to stay on their toes and keep being at the edge, moat defences have lowered and competition is up, as consumers we will get much better products for much cheaper. Let's just hope there is enough people left with jobs to pay for the services and the others can re-invent theirselves in a career that is still valuable in an LLM world.
If this is the start of epic competing on features and quality for both devs and players instead of just buying up exclusive rights then I'm all for it
Can we stop putting Chrome in everything? Why does it take billions of instructions and hundreds of thousands to billions of bytes of RAM to display some text and pictures?
Fair question, but there is a decent answer. It's because Steam is an app that is shipped to 3 platforms and at least 2 architectures; the web platform is a platform- and architecture-agnostic target; and there is an extremely large set of tools and large developer pool to pull from. It may not be the set of you trade-offs you would have chosen, but it's also a reasonable choice for the problem they are tackling with the set of real-world constraints they are presented with.
Valve: “thank God we are paying (checks notes) hundreds of thousands to be .5 seconds faster on a desktop app boot. Let’s push out the marketing material!”
Not that it's specifically relevant to this but it's bloody terrible that we need any launcher at all. A whole generation is barely even aware that you used to able to buy and play a game without an online middleman sitting on your computer.
It may be faster than Epic, but it is still unreasonably slow for something that really does very little at the end of the day. It's quite tragic that the company that brought us Proton and Windows games on Linux at near equal performance can't do a better job with the client or can't be bothered to improve it. That, and the decades old bugs in Half Life, Left 4 Dead and other classic games that probably still generate not insignificant revenue.
How about actually testing both launchers on same device or at least give startup numbers of steam before/after update? So annoyed by this "comparison" honestly.
This website is just reddit at this point. No one reads the article, no one cares about what is actually true , everyone is just giving their own anecdotes about some random shit.
This article is completely worthless and contains zero useful information, no conclusions about anything can be derived from it.
From my own testing the Epic launcher is still significantly faster than steam at launch, but I do not know if I have gotten the update or if its on a beta branch.
Presumably people here understand how software profiling or whatever works, why can no one here see how obviously nonsensical the reporting here is.
Like when they made two generations of XBox consoles boot 5 seconds faster by making the unskippable boot animation 5 seconds shorter. Many years after the exact same issue bottlenecked Windows 7 boot times on SSDs.
Great. Now make it not need a constantly running process, and not using GB of memory when I forget to close it. May not be a big deal on a desktop, but on a laptop having this kind of bloat is obnoxious.
They would have to rewrite the app and use Tauri/WebView2 or native code. CEF blows up your memory use because you ship a whole ass Chromium browser.
You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though. It's just how they work, you need to keep track of play time and respond to any API calls from the game. But it could be a native background daemon instead of two Steam Web Helpers.
> You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though
I disagree. I get that steam has useful features I want while in-game (e.g. invite a friend to play), but there's no reason it couldn't just run this launcher only when a steam game is running and immediately exit once it's done.
Also, I think a lot of people forget how small well written software can be -- we're talking like single or double digit megabytes. Heck there's a whole linux distro that's under 20mb.
> They would have to rewrite the app and use Tauri/WebView2 or native code. CEF blows up your memory use because you ship a whole ass Chromium browser.
The only benefits of Tauri are the smaller application package and the fact that the runtime is always up to date (which can also be a downside). That full package doesn't live in RAM when it's running, so it's "merely" wasted disk space and not RAM. In terms of RAM it uses just as much as electron or CEF.
It is incredibly funny that Steam could have fixed this at any time, but didn't prioritise doing so until Epic openly challenged them. This is why we can't have nice things™
This is a garbage article, lmao. Comparing architectures as "AI assisted (vibe coded)" and "Optimized modular CEF", and highlighting Steam as being faster in tray restore when it is slower.
Honestly, I have no idea what business Steam has starting for whopping 5 seconds as it is right now (after the 'speedup').
It is a simple shell for launching already downloaded apps. This is disgrace and nothing to boast about, especially considering Valve takes 30% cut of basically PC gaming marked for making it.
It's way more than this. Some may argue about how useful all of these features are, but Steam client is also a store (with lots of personalizations), a social network (forums, text and voice chat, personal profiles etc), a mod hosting platform, a game review site, a digital marketplace (cards and items. You may be surprised how popular this aspect is). It also does the controller remapping, manages cloud saves and screenshots/videos, allows to store games at several locations at ones. It provides games related news, checks for updates on all of the installed games.
Again, one may argue how useful all of this is, but it is there, and most users likely have the app on a OS startup anyway.
Wow this is really the unthinking man's blog post. This is a known slop news site and HN should not allow it here. I like Steam, but at least Epic actually gave a comparison that we can interpret as two load times on the same PC. These metrics are completely useless without that.
Somebody clipping how long it takes Steam to open on their computer with no other context is pretty meaningless. For all we know, it's running slower on their computer today. There's no before/after, no comparison to Epic. Yet this article just confidently asserted the figure as universal. Moronic.
Welcome. Sadly right now the initial activation (when UI appears) can still be a noticeable time after process launch, and thus still feel a bit like a focus steal, but hopefully there will be improvements there soon.
Epic Games, Inc. owns the RAD Debugger source code yet instead of pointing the clanker (and/or their human(s)!!) at it and saying hey go make a instantaneously-launching high-performance modern library/storefront application based on that, instead they vibecoded up yet another Modern Web Stack travesty that still takes plural seconds to launch—and they have the gall to brag about it as though this is some kind of massive achievement?!
Like, awesome, at least the freaking game launcher/storefront experience is no longer an Unreal Engine game—great work guys, huge improvement, now it's not a total shitshow of unimaginable ineptitude, just a regular, run-of-the-mill shitshow. But that's hardly worth patting yourselves on the back about!
I really hate all these gaming related wars. I liked it better when arguing about stuff like this was regarded as juvenile. It’s a sign of our times I guess, grown men so withdrawn from the system that these sort of battles are front and center to a lot of them.
Nobody asked for this! We just want more, better and cheaper games! That's it. I could care less how quick it takes to launch an app which then stays open for hours/days.
I was in my 30s before I understood that people say "could care less" when they mean "couldn't care less." I'll never understand how people can say it without wanting to claw out their larynx as badly as it makes me want to claw out my eardrums, but I'm gradually learning acceptance -- and how not to let my horror show on my face.
This feels like a strange argument given site we are on. "Why are applications so slow and bloated these days" has been a pretty constant complaint around here for many, many years.
The 'vibe coded' part needs to go. Both teams likely used AI-assisted coding. Neither team's product was completed by robots, not with current tech. Epic had the launcher update ready in advance to handle the bad PR from their announcement. Prepare for more announcements from Epic how AI and not humans solved something.
The industry is trying to sanitize this term to be synonymous with AI-assisted coding and I hate it. They are trying to blur the lines between skilled engineers who use AI, and everyone else.
I used to think vibe coding would get us slow Electron apps but now we got speed wars between game launchers. I hope this comes for all types of software.
With that said, I tested it right now and Steam takes about 2 seconds to restore from tray and 10-15 for cold boot. The new Epic launcher is around 0.5 and 5 like the article mentioned. Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something.
It's nice but a low bar. Steam pioneered crappy Chrome-based desktop apps before Electron existed, which is also why it's so hard to run Steam in Wine. It has a longer startup and shutdown process (they even call it that) than my entire OS.
Epic, EA, etc then made their own similar launchers. Of course all of them also want to launch when Windows boots, update constantly, and not close when you press close.
I’m pretty sure the early steam client was based on Trident before chromium no?
Edit: actually it seems to have been Trident, then WebKit, then Chromium Embedded
Yes, but when they finally switched to Chromium, it was still before Electron
Vibe coding can yield us Tauri apps that end up being like 3mb rather than 130mb for a "Hello World" app.
I would go one step farther - if you're vibe coding, skip Tauri altogether. I've been on-and-off vibecoding a GitKraken replacement using egui instead, and the memory footprint is very low. Otherwise can't tell the difference, as I'm not reading the code either way.
Using Tauri on Linux gave me appreciation for why Electron just ships an entire browser. WebKitGTK is kinda rough around the edges.
I vibe-coded a paste manager using wails (https://github.com/egeozcan/mahpastes), and I'm currently on linux (bazzite) and I have 0 problems with the rendering.
One of the things I hit is that there is no way to trigger an "open folder" dialog. It gets mapped to "open file" instead. The correct hooks exist in both WebKit and in GTK, but not wired up in WebKitGTK. I think the fix would be quite minor but I looked into what is involved in raising a patch and decided to leave it. There are a lot of minor paper cuts like this.
I did hit a couple of CSS or rendering quirks, but the rendering perf also seemed noticeably poor, and that's harder to live with.
Recently vibe coded this https://www.rominabox.app/ and also loved Tauri for the "builder" part of it! What a pleasure to work with.
Granted, it's very simple, but I felt it was a breeze.
Isn't egui really cpu inefficient though? It repaints at 60fps if e.g. you move the mouse over it
If it is, it hasn't been a problem so far. I have been focused heavily on memoization, to what extent that's possible when fully vibe coding.
Fwiw, what it's trying to replace (GitKraken) is slow, clunky, and resource hungry, so it's not hard to beat.
No mobile support either
You're probably doing something the LLM has less fluency with.
Definitely would concede this, but I haven't had any issues so far. It's been able to make things look exactly as I've dictated them, even with relatively complex visualization of git branching. I get the sense that, with how capable Opus 5.5 is, "less capable" no longer means "not capable enough".
LLMs can for sure write GTK4 (or Relm4), Swift UI, whatever windows uses, Kotlin for Android.
They can write brainfuck. I said less fluency.
What I meant: they can write it pretty well. Probably because share of good quality code of native apps is much higher bad quality, due to all js slop we had even before LLM slop.
You can just skip Tauri entirely and get true native apps. No web wrapping required
But there’s still no way to get consistent results cross-platform without a web view, right? I guess Tauri isn’t even consistent because it relies on the system’s browser and they do differ to some degree.
My friend, inconsistency is the entire point. You now have incredible power to write truly native apps that fit in with the platform and follow all the standards. The bottleneck is now you, or whoever owns each target platform and understands what native apps feel like.
So I’m supposed to maintain a native app for each platform and try to be sure they’re aligned in every way except visuals? Sounds like a recipe for bad UX if anybody uses more than one of them.
Not you, your coding agent, for three platforms and at least ten languages
If you go Rust all the way all you need is the installer for each platform
Agents are pretty shit at making UX decisions unless you're heavily in the training distribution
On the contrary: using a web view is the worst possible UX for your users. It's slow, uses a ton of memory, and doesn't integrate well with the desktop. The only reason people ever did it was laziness, not because it produced a better product.
I'd argue that being slow and using a ton of memory has more to do with (very) poorly optimized websites rather than blaming browsers as a whole. Sure, they'll never be as efficient as native, but people put a lot of work into optimizing browsers and most websites are never optimized.
Memory use alone is an interesting case for comparison because websites tend to have a lot more images/videos loaded than other applications. All of those PNGs and JPEGs need to be decompressed before you can paint them to the screen which makes them much larger.
> I'd argue that being slow and using a ton of memory has more to do with (very) poorly optimized websites rather than blaming browsers as a whole.
A web browser is a huge platform. Audio, 2D and 3D graphics, file handling, network requests,... A lot of code while your application needs are tiny. That is wasteful and a security risk.
That's really only argument against shipping a browser with your application. For ordinary websites (or WebViews) that's not really a concern because it is shared and automatically updated.
Yeah the problem is having to write 5 apps, not the inconsistency.
If you're writing five apps, you're doing it wrong. A huge amount of probably any app can be contained in a common blob of business logic and wiring, with some native presentation on top. Yes, I oversimplify, but folks have been doing exactly that for decades. More work? Yup, even with a common engine it's more work than firing up Electron. That's where "do we even give a shit about what we're shipping?" comes in. If there's no pride in the finished product, well, Electron isn't going to save your product, either.
IME, the UI library idiosyncrasies are the pieces that take the longest to get right. Common business logic is super simple by comparison.
> A huge amount of probably any app can be contained in a common blob of business logic and wiring, with some native presentation on top.
I keep seeing people claim this, yet most UI software I see really doesn't do anything that complicated. It's some basic database CRUD stuff and some basic algorithms, and then all the actual effort lies in making the UI feel good.
> Yeah the problem is having to write 5 apps, not the inconsistency.
Isn’t that what abstraction and interface is about? You can write the common business logic and presentation concerns, and then share it across each native implementation.
That is what web wrapping is in truth, but it’s just inneficient because of the huge surface area of web technologies.
For a whole lot of apps, almost all of the difficult stuff is in making the UI feel right.
Aesthetics, usability, and technical flavor are different axes and feel right is a subjective point. And based on anecdata, usability is what actual users want. Web wrapping is mostly an exclusive focus on aesthetics. With native frameworks, you often get very close to "feel right" without much effort.
> With native frameworks, you often get very close to "feel right" without much effort.
I've only seen this sentiment on nerd forums but never among my less technical friends, so I'm a bit reluctant to accept this wisdom honestly. That said, if you're just building something for a technical crowd you'll probably make them much happier if you make your implementation use native widgets and take up much less memory and redraw faster at the expense of a slightly jankier UX. Though, this is probably why IRC clients all feel janky lol.
For example a lot of my less technical friends/family really like the visual design of Spotify even though it conflicts with a lot of design language on MacOS, Windows, and Android.
Or my manager... or my stakeholders. Damn you powers that be!
> But there’s still no way to get consistent results cross-platform without a web view, right?
… good? I want my applications to be consistent with the platform they run on, not with their own stupidity on other platforms.
The hidden reason why so many people are frustrated with 'modern design' that goes unaddressed is that most software nowadays completely ignores the standards of the system it runs on. Every single developer of even the most trivial apps insists that their design language is the most important in the room, which is what brings us to the temptation of using a webapp for everything so every user on every OS sees the exact same thing. It's gotten so bad that the only places I see native system UIs from third parties is either older software or hobbyist projects, but never anything corporate.
Some of that is also that what "native UI" means has shifted a bit. To look at Windows, Win95 had a thoroughly considered UI design that was very well adapted to both what it needed to do and the hard constraints on it. Win11 is... kind of a shitshow. (Are parts of it still from Windows 3.1? I haven't tried to track them down... but in Win10 there were a few dark corners.) It made sense to match the native UI in the Win95 days. It often doesn't now, it's simply not a target worth hitting. You could just use Win32 and target the older Win95 look, but apart from appearance issues, it was designed to work well in 1995, and we simply demand different things from our UIs now. Like support for touchscreens. Old Win32 apps are painful on touchscreens. (But, often, awesome without a mouse.) And those are real considerations, not oooh-shiny-new-thing designer BS.
Yes, modern Windows design is a bit of a mess, caused by both the designer bug of redesigning everything (we have had at least 3 different Windows design languages prevalent over the last 10 years) and Windows having to support extremely old legacy software. The second was almost nonexistent when Windows 95 was designed, they could have a true clean slate, so the comparison isn't as fair. But still, even with the abundance of native UI frameworks, the point holds true that no new software uses any of them, no matter if it's Win32 or WinUI. They could implement them very easily, and some hobbyist software does so, and it looks very native and in-line with the rest of Windows 11, but they choose not to.
And yes, the 3.11 ODBC file selector is still in Windows 11. Praise be to legacy components.
As a user of both windows and mac operating systems, I'd rather the app be consistent between them so I don't have to adopt a different workflow depending on which OS I'm using the app on.
What’s wrong with something like Qt or wxWidgets for native crossplattform GUI frameworks?
Is consistent results what you want? non-native controls look and behave funny on iOS, and the iOS look on any other platform is annoying.
Skia is the 2D graphics library used in Chromium. A number of GUI frameworks (Flutter and Avalonia) directly use Skia to do non-native platform GUIs that are consistent across platforms.
"Consistent across platforms" is not a user requirement.
There is also Slint that'd fir perfectly. Others have built game launcher with it as well
Like these https://goodapps.store/
Disclaimer: All mine, open-source, ai-assisted, less than 5MB each. I love rust+tauri combo.
Much better it can give us just webview in wry and winit without tauri bloat
Tauri doesn't solve the problems Electron solves. It just externalizes the solution so things can subtly stop working randomly.
I see it as a forcing function to clean up tech debt
> forcing function to clean up tech debt
The real reason rewrites to fix tech debt used to fail was that it took too long to get to feature partity & the goal posts moved constantly while you were on the rewrite team.
The sunk cost of existing code is no longer considered in a rewrite.
Maybe it was hard to write in the first place, but it is not hard to rewrite anymore, as long you've got decent tests.
I think in Steam's case it was more like a lack of competitive pressure, their publisher dashboard still packs HTML/CSS fixes for IE6/7/8 that's code they probably haven't touched in ~20 years and it's certainly not because they couldn't afford or lacked time to work on it!
I actually think that vibe coding lends itself well to stuff with really strict type systems. When you use Claude Code, it basically works on a loop until it gets something "right". A type system allows for part of the "right" criteria to be baked into the compilation, giving a hard block if it doesn't at least pass that.
I've had reasonably good luck having Claude generate Rust code that performs well.
yeah, Steam takes forever to start, one of the slowest apps I use. Photoshop is similarly lethargic starting up.
> Maybe it's still in A/B testing or something
Are you on the beta branch? It doesn't look like its in stable yet (Settings --> Interface --> Client Beta Participation)
It’s similar for the productivity/launcher app Raycast. They’re trying to find new USPs compared to the many copycats.
Not really a war. Steam updated their client the day before Epic decided to mouth off. Kinda hilarious actually.
Surprise it’s speed wars between Electron apps. Steam is based on Chromium/Electron.
The new version of Epic is based on Tauri. Also written in JS and probably React (haven't decompiled it yet) but the web runtime is part of Windows instead of shipped with the app so it takes less disk space and RAM. And you can write perf sensitive code in Rust for even more speedup.
I also avoid installing Tauri apps too. Anything that loads Javascript that’s not my browser is a bad smell and potential resource hog IMO.
Would you say a desktop application using lua instead of javascript has less smell? What do you make of something like mpv, which supports both?
Interesting, I didn't know they moved to a Chromium based desktop application. But honestly, I don't feel like there's any performance issues with the steam desktop client (I'm running it on Fedora, but I'm assuming performance is relatively similar on different platforms).
Ref: https://docs.steambrew.app/developers/environment
The switch from IE/Trident to Chromium happened in 2010 alongside launching support for Macs.
I'd imagine one can now focus on creating a client for a single OS and having the AI do the porting to others as it would essentially be a translation.
Perhaps it will bring back native apps because supporting other platforms is less laborious.
i don't care how fast it is beyond a certain point. What is more shocking is all the bugs that vibe coding landed epic. I can't imagine shipping software at this scale in this state.
Hopefully LLM models and harnesses improve to where Chromium or Electron apps can be more trivially converted to native apps. You're paying for tokens for downstream compute efficiency across the user base.
They already are. I asked opus 5.5 to plan out and begin building a swift version of my electron notes app, using a similar architecture / feature set. I hut enter and honestly forgot about it. 2 hours later im reading slack while making my next round of coffee, and my session is interrupted by a native app opening on my phone (the model installed it for me to test). It.... has 2/3 of the features already and looks awesome, holy crap. It skipped my suggestion to use the Lexical (web) editor and is.... using. platform native one.
time will tell if it can make it the way i like but.... it can definitely get far. Used 40% of my session limits on my $20/mo sub.
I wonder what best practices here look like at this point. In my world, we've moved past skills for something like this, having porting helper/validator/etc things be harness level is measurably better than what skills look like right now. The open plugin spec is certainly an improvement (namely in packaging and distribution)- but, really you'd be leaving perf on the table if you were not to tune your harness. I wonder if something like dsh, pi, or other extensible (coding) harnesses have something like a concept of "harness as an extension".
> Epic may have “vibe coded” a faster client, but Valve proved that targeted optimization on a decades-old ecosystem can still beat out AI speedruns.
Optimizing a project with AI is one of the most trivial things you can do with AI.
I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
Once I had a good benchmark script, Opus 4.8 or whatever made my terminal app faster with less memory than ghostty and kitty. It's not even interesting.
> The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
The dark forest hypothesis is that we can't find any alien life because it's dangerous to broadcast your existence and location to competitors. So rational thing for every alien civilian to do (and arguably for us) is to keep quiet.
But what does it mean in this context?
I'll try: It's dangerous to broadcast your AI use to competitors, users and the public for fear of being attacked.
It's "sort of" a dark forest problem because admitting you're using AI is socially risky. Indeed, this entire thread is built on the idea that Epic's lazy use of AI has been bested by the savvy & righteous programmers at Valve[1].
So people who think AI is actually a really useful tool and that using it to make your project better will imagine that everyone who makes things better today uses AI at least a little, and assumes they don't talk about it because they don't want to get yelled at. Meanwhile, if you think AI does bad work (or is often used badly) you can ascribe bad software to bad uses of the tool. We can never know for sure because people don't talk about it.
[1] I happen to agree with this dichotomy but that belief precedes AI
Yeah exactly, Valve engineers probably just told AI to make it faster.
Your "dark forest" analogy sounds reasonable but Epic's outright admission of "vibe coding" is a bit of a footgun considering how rabidly anti-AI the folks on sites like Reddit are. If they had just been like, "it's faster and supports Linux" they would be the darling of the internet.
Epic Games wants to make an "AI-first" game, so they need to push "vibe coding" onto the gaming audiences to get them to accept it before they lay off people and ask $69 for a game where the art is made by an AI model.
https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3mxp...
> I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI...
I don't see why not. They clearly know what they are doing at Valve, and for an engineer who knows what he's doing, LLMs are of very limited use.
> They clearly know what they are doing at Valve
Yeah, at promoting child gambling. Not sure about games
This is getting tiring.
You might not like hearing it, but it is true.
Code has never been the bottleneck for a skilled engineer, and if you value high quality then you need to spend a lot of time reading over the slop LLMs produce to turn it into something hardened and reliable. So, for a skilled engineer, LLMs have a very marginal benefit in terms of delivery speed.
This is backed up by LLM productivity studies.
> I also wouldn't buy it for a second that Valve engineers aren't using AI, especially for something as trivial as "hey claude rank the top causes of slow startup" -> "oh okay now fix". The most I'd grant is that everyone uses AI secretly as a sort of dark forest problem.
This is probably the saddest comment I've read on HN. It really shows the state of this place and how far into psychosis the comments have fallen.
All I can think with this whole situation is how much time is wasted by people getting angry and defensive on behalf of a Valve. It's almost like people have a parasocial relationship with the application itself.
That's not even getting to some of the "missing" features.
No Community marketplace for in-game items
No Direct player-to-player item trading
No Digital trading cards, levelling, and points shop
I hope more application developers "forget" to add these features.
People have wasted their time defending their platform's "honour" for decades. It used to be Sega vs Nintendo. Then it was PlayStation vs XBox. Now it's Steam vs EGS.
Anyway, what are useful features of Steam:
- their dedication to getting Windows games running on Linux (to see off the existential threat Microsoft poses to them, but nonetheless greatly appreciated)
- community forums / screenshots / artwork / guides etc. for every product. Very useful if the game vendor doesn't have its own, and most game vendors don't
- that Steam Sales encourage vendors to offer games at much more reasonable prices (e.g. a few pounds/dollars/etc.) for what is effectively a license, revocable at any time, not a real purchase. £60? Ha ha fuck off, I'm waiting for the sale when it's £5
- also, as far as I've seen, every game distributed can still be downloaded today. People may complain that publishers update a title e.g. to remove licensed music 10 years later... but you can still download the old version with some trickery. And I've never seen Steam actively remove downloads for existing customers, I've only seen games removed from the store so no future customers
- pirates have found that most games, if their only DRM is Steamworks, are incredibly easy to crack. I am very glad Steam has convinced most publishers to use that alone and nothing worse, and I curse publishers who insist on their own DRM, their own launcher, etc. If Valve goes tits-up, I have a lot of confidence most of peoples libraries will still be playable with a little bit of cracking.
There are other useful features, even if Valve is getting rich and fat off selling gambling and day-trading to teenagers.
I think the "fanboyism" of Steam is a bit different to platform wars like PS vs Xbox, etc.
Fundamentally Valve has built up a lot of trust with the gaming community, and other than microtransactions and gambling, I think it's very fair to say they've been a net good for both the PC gaming community; as well as the ecosystem.
Proton is a great example.
Valve have my trust just by being privately held company that can actually plan for decades ahead instead of try to appease major shareholders or black rock.
It took them 10 years to make Linux a competetive gaming platform.
They invested in VR early and still do a lot for this niche market.
They brought back hanfheld PC from being niche chinese devices to being mainstrean and maintain support for Steam Deck for 5 years.
As game developer I do find 30% cut abysmal, but it's not any worse than consoles and I dont like Epic as a gamer for being awfully anti-consumer. I certainly dont want PC game market to be controlled by chinese Tencent subsidiaries.
Getting involved with epic games as a game developer feels like willingly feeding yourself into the mouth of an open shark. Yeah maybe they have a better cut, but I'm still not doing it
Valve rightly get a lot of flak for the gambling and high % cut, but you do get a functional useful service in return at least, that doesn't appear to be actively trying to screw you over
Don't forget big picture mode. Nowadays Steam is a better game console than an actual game console. That's the only way I use it anymore.
...and the hardware ecosystem, too. I just got my Steam controller last week, and it's wonderful. It's so good I'm playing Civ with it. Civ! On a gamepad!
> unmodderated community forums
FTFY. Steam forums are a cesspoll most often than not. No, we do not want a easy accessible place where people can spew their crap on the internet. It's either moderated and useful or it shouldn't exists.
Really depends on which game, and yes the forums are moderated by Steam staff, who at least understand the role correctly (internet janitor, not little personal fiefdom)
To pick a random game's forum: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1623940/discussions/ we find:
- bug reports, feedback to the devs, etc.
- asking for help in the game
- story discussion
- requests for games like this one
- concern troll (locked)
- begging for the game to be released on GOG
Seems above board to me. I've also seen plenty of trolling, incivility and unreasonable expectations from manchildren, but they tend to get locked.
Ahh yes, we need more hall monitors and thought police on steam forums! That will surely improve the platform!
> No User-written text reviews
Everything you don’t like, you can avoid.
First thing in the article: "this is such a good day to be a sweeney hater" I don't even want to know what this means, dude needs to get a hobby.
Without competition Valve would never have bothered making Steam faster. Steam hasn't meaningfully changed in a decade, and feels well out of date. I celebrate Epic forcing Valve to finally make some improvements. Turns out they could do it in a day all along.
> Steam hasn't meaningfully changed in a decade
They completely rewrote their UI? Do you not remember the old library? The old downloads page? The old big picture mode? You may be suffering from selective memory
I dont care about faster startup times for steam, as long as its under a minute.
If any big company want a good steam alternative we would have it.
Every alternative launcher, uplay/ubisoft connect, origin/ea app, epic games, gog started with a store platform and stopped. Its like the marketing team just looked at the store but not at the rest of the steam features.
One of the top post on the steam sub reddit is titled "They got us guys." as if they work for Valve.
Bonus points, this is the text from the post.
> How out of touch can you be as a company, this is embarrassing
I "defend" valve because they're seemingly the only company that cares about the end-user linux experience.
Rocket league used to have a Linux build, then epic decided to kill that off entirely.
I recently bought the steam frame. It's years past when I would have wanted this VR headset the most, but half the reason I bought it was to support Valve's R&D with Linux desktop support, arm JIT translation, etc.
People bitch and moan about "voting with your wallet", then you have a company that tons of people continually vote with their wallet for, then people complain about others defending the one company that doesn't seem to want to screw their userbase over.
Sure Steam has some blind spots for the very sweaty semi-pro gamer. I don't care about virtual stickers and little treats. I care that all my games run on my Linux desktop after years of devs not giving a shit and other companies being openly hostile.
Valves competitors suck. Their VR competitor is Meta which in a just world would not exist as an organization. Their gaming marketplace competitor is Epic, which produces the character-slop extraction shooter and a launcher that gets more annoying to use every time I open it.
The other "competitors" if you can even call them that, are microsoft who has basically deleted a dozen game studios in the last year via moneyball, and other game companies like EA and Ubisoft who routinely delete purchased games and tell the users to go suck it.
Valve is basically the only company out there who is resisting the constant urge to make everything shitty to increase investor profits. They stay private and everyone loves what they do with that power. I'm sure a ton of fail-son PE bros are dying for the chance to buy out valve and turn everything it's ever done to absolute dogshit. We'd be getting half-life 3, 4, 5, 6, mobile, etc and they'd all be shit.
I "defend" valve because they're seemingly the only company that cares about the end-user linux experience.
Why bother defending them about this specific issue though?
Either Epic is right, and this pushes Valve to improve Steam performance.
Or Epic is wrong, and then who cares? People will continue to not use the Epic store and continue to use Steam.
It just feels more "defensive" then "defending" if that framing makes sense.
I think the commenter was addressing your initial comment about fanboyism (or more charitably, being fans of) Steam.
People are fans of Steam (of Valve, actually) because Steam has been a boon for the gaming world and for Linux gaming in particular, in a way others (like Epic) haven't. I subscribe to this opinion. I'm just so glad gaming on Linux is mostly seamless now, I simply don't care anymore for which OS a game was built (within reason... but then again, Windows games are not guaranteed to always run on Windows either!).
hear, hear!
I think in this case people just really hate Epic.
I do genuinely dislike their game launcher, but also I don't want to have multiple game launchers even if it was working well given it's just overhead.
I'll happily pay to have a game on Steam vs getting it for free on Epic. Steam has been a good experience for me the past 2+ decades :)
I'd love to see governments decouple distribution and production in media - roughly, let any streaming service serve any tv/film, let any game service serve any game ... consumer's choice.
It would be under a 'most-favoured nation' type deal, after an initial launch period (exclusive distribution for 1 year, say) if my distribution service pays the same per-view amount then I can stream/distribute your media regardless of your deals. If a producer/creator makes a work available they are required to allow it on other registered channels (no setup cost beyond actual price of downloading the content).
Essentially make rights holders honour the idea that they'd make works S available if only people would pay.
Refuse to make a work available and you'd get a warning, then it enters the public domain. The copyright deal is "things enter the pubic domain after a limited monopoly to allow recompense", enforce it. So, if eg Netflix/Sony/BBC/etc stop offering their back catalogue then the works enter the public domain.
I wouldnt mind Epic if their platform wasn't so intentionally anti-consumer. I dont have any issues with Epic other products - I dont play Fortnite, but Unreal was net positive for gamedev and Epic also sponsored a lot of open sourcr software including Godot which is nice of them.
Unfortunately literally everything is wrong with EGS specifically.
Their stance on intentionally not having user reviews because consumers shouldn't have power to react to publisher or developers decisions.
Their giving away games for free and then revoking licenses then removing them from accounts even though it was purely their own fault. They were most successful company ever back then and could certainly eat that loss.
Their shitty account system that certainly got hacked multiple times because it's the only gaming platform where someone constantly trying to access my accounts even though I'm Linux and cybersecurity nerd with random 32-char passwords. They also dont have straightforward way to change account region without trying to deal with their shitty support.
Tim Sweeney decided to make a platform to fuck over gamers and we gamers returned favour.
luckily, epic is worth hating.
Steam client is INFINITELY faster than Epic client, across those dimensions.
BTW Gaben is my friend and I identify as Dr Gordon Freeman.
/s
Parasocial relationships are a byproduct of the technology you (I assume) and I have and continue to create & roll-out to society, increasing physical distance from actual humans as well as increasing "in the head, only" identity, or identities, that culture carries with itself more and more.
> No Discussion forums and community hubs
> No User-written text reviews
> No Community-created guides and walkthroughs
>No Screenshot, clip, and artwork sharing
I can’t believe they don’t have the resource to bring these features to their launcher, they actively refuse to make it a tool for communities.
It must be a way to buy game and launch them, that’s all. Don’t talk, don’t give your opinion on the game, don’t help others in forums,..
I managed to stay away from epic even when they locked games from steam, glad I did. It’s embarrassing.
Ok but why didn't they do it sooner? The Steam client is terrible and there is no excuse for it.
> The Steam client is terrible
Things nobody has said since like 2005? A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal. Especially when everyone just leaves it running anyway. There's far more significant aspects like memory usage, game library, and general features.
The client is definetly terrible. Slow to start. I have frikkin 2 different topbars that seemingly have similar options. Way to many locations for settings, spammy store page. Hard to navigate game library. The fact that the store page often is a better look at the game than the one in the library. Impossible to see what dlcs that is enabled unless you happen to borrow the game from someone in your family. Why van games corrupt and un and reinstalling is the only fix (verifying does sometimes not catch it).
I could go on. Its still the only store with acceptable linux experience sadly.
I agree the client is pretty scuffed, but I don't understand your problems:
> I have frikkin 2 different topbars that seemingly have similar options.
I am not sure exactly what you mean by "top bars" but my two top sets of menus are "Steam View Friends Help" and "STORE LIBRARY COMMUNITY <USERNAME>" which seem quite different.
> The fact that the store page often is a better look at the game than the one in the library.
You can go to the store page from the library! Why would you assume you should re-explain the game to a player? I think reminding you of when you did things in the game makes a lot of sense. I wish it listed playtime and not just achievements.
> Impossible to see what dlcs that is enabled unless you happen to borrow the game from someone in your family.
I do think their DLC display is bad, but it's far from impossible. Properties -> DLC shows you all your DLC and which is enabled. Also clicking on the DLC tab does show you which you own (and all the ones you own will be enabled by default).
Like I said, I think steam has a lot of problems, but I don't understand your complaints at all. I would complain about the awful performance of a webview, the annoying behavior of store pages, the foolishness of the "All" tab on communities that mixes different kinds of content in one place but it will never change because people can't find it otherwise, etc.
"Acceptable" is doing heavy lifting, because if you have a non-us keyboard layout Steam moves heaven and earth to ensure that no matter how hard you work to launch games with US keyboard, they will still use your non-US layout and be broken by default.
> A faster startup is certainly appreciated, but steam's 10 second cold launch time is hardly a big deal.
When I hear about a game on social media I often want to add it to a wishlist on Steam but I dread opening the app because I know it will take forever to open on MacOS.
I don't mind a game launcher taking time, but the store is a part of that which makes it annoying I avoid the native app for that reason.
It’s been a little while since I used Steam but you used to be able to do that from their own website, I think it was store.steampowered.com (I am guessing the website from memory). My game PC wasn’t my main PC so I didn’t even had Steam on that pc and it was what I used to buy the games - don’t really remember if I wishlist too because I use bookmarks in web browsers and folders for the bookmarks.
The Steam client on macos is the slowest program I've used. I just uninstalled it and use the browser for store/community pages because the steam client is unusable.
I get people hate Epic, but the Steam client is not particularly well made or snappy. And I'd love to see competition kick their asses in to improving it.
A launcher is a parasite mostly used to collect stats. Having it take five seconds before you even get to the point of actually starting to load your game is preposterous. Whereas who cares if it takes five seconds for a store to load? At least I play games more often than buy new ones.
I don't have a MacOS comparison point, but steam for me is pretty equivalent to the numbers in the article. ~10 seconds for a cold start, half a second for a warm start. Unless you have a very different definition of "take forever"? What are you seeing on MacOS?
I tested the latest Steam build on MacOS and it took 7 seconds to load on an M4 Max and I had to close a popup when it opened.
In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever. Same with mobile, if you tapped an app icon and it loaded that slow it would never be tolerated.
Thankfully you can turn off that news popup in the settings.
> In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever.
But a game client is not a web page. You open it once (some people, on boot) and then it's just sitting there. You don't randomly start it from scratch whenever you run a game...
And even if you did, 7-10 seconds waiting for a game to start is not the same as waiting for a page to load. You can wait for the game.
"You don't randomly start it from scratch whenever you run a game..." Uh, this is exactly what I do. What's so special about an app that launches apps that it needs to be left warm constantly?
m5pro 64gb, 3s to get to the first 'loading window', 5s to get to the store page. But honestly who gives a shit. If you are the average working joe who comes home from work and fires up the pc to play a game, a 5s load of steam is not even a piece of gravel in the road let alone a speed bump. It's not like i'm opening and closing steam 100, 50 or even 5 times a day. It's a useless metric.
Standards are so low these days.
> If you are the average working joe who comes home from work and fires up the pc to play a game
My usecase was wanting to add a game to a wishlist
> It's not like i'm opening and closing steam 100, 50 or even 5 times a day.
I've opened Steam app about a thousand times and it's always felt like clunky dated software.
I occasionally want to play a little video game after work. The amount of nonsense involved before actually launching the game has deterred me enough that I usually play something not on Steam instead. Like, AssaultCube launches instantly. Even Minecraft with the right launcher is pretty quick.
> In the web world and 7-10 seconds for a pageload is forever.
Given that its primary purposes are to start video games that take anywhere from five to thirty+ seconds to start and to download video games and their patches which range in size between many hundreds of MBs to a hundred+ GBs, the client taking roughly ten seconds to start is no problem.
Optimize where it makes sense, yanno? I'd much rather have to "deal with" the Steam client taking ten seconds to start than to have to deal with the Epic Games Launcher's download rate being limited to 100->150 mbit/s. [0]
[0] Last I checked on this was a few years ago -like twelve months after Sea Of Thieves stopped being widely popular- so it may have improved. The absurdly slow download speeds [1] are one of the bigger reasons why I stopped using EGS.
[1] Sure, many people don't have connections any faster than that. I do. Steam saturates it, and -at the time- EGS absolutely did not and occupied 100% of one logical CPU while failing to do so.
? I already addressed in my original comment that I wouldn't care if it was just a game launcher but the Stream app is more than that.
It opens to the store page for a reason, not to your library page.
I highly recommend just using your normal browser to navigate the store. Using it within the client doesn't really provide any advantages at all.
My computer in the 90s used to take 30 minutes to boot. Now we complain about 10 second load times. What a world.
A modern computer runs circles around your 90s computer... if the code was the same, it should be crazy fast. Instead, everything is a web browser, and each of them need to load 1gb of junk into memory each time you click on them.
That's excessive even for the 90's
Startup is one thing, using the program is another. Steamwebhelper, the chromium based tool that renders everything web based in the client is awfully optimized and likes to noticeably utilize the CPU even when minimized on the tray, yet somehow always serves me with a blank page whenever I go store, community etc. on first try, I have to click the label multiple times to get anything. You can't even kill the process, because it's immediately relaunched, I just wish there was an option to disable it and only get the library.
I definitely don't leave the Steam launcher running all the time, on macOS it takes up a non-trivial amount of memory that I want to have available for other apps. I launch Steam when I want to play some games, then quit it when I want to do other stuff.
the steam client is definitely kind of terrible, maybe i’m just biased because i have used steam deck since launch which uses big picture, but there have been bugs in the client that were extremely annoying and obvious that took years to fix (for example, closing a store page and losing page position, but then the page would scroll up when pressing down on a controller for years).
A very obvious non-deck example is how bad it can be at loading and showing videos on the store page. They consistently have issues with smooth playback, this is not my network, others i know have the same issue. it’s to the point that I scroll down and look at gifs in the description for gameplay footage first. I use the discovery queue often and it’s pretty apparent.
When I browse the store, I specifically do it in a browser because the client is so unpleasant to use. For launching games I have no choice. I love Steam as a concept and company, but it is not an enjoyable app to use by its own merits, in my opinion.
I find it very annoying. But not annoying enough to make me stop using Steam.
The upsides of having a de facto monopoly, I suppose—lamentably common story in tech.
Steam crashes my window manager every time I close it now. This started a couple weeks ago.
it changed from a small, fast native client to webshit quite a few years ago. the performance is acceptable now but it is indeed magnitudes slower. it also steals focus several times during startup which is the single greatest thing a developer of client software can do to be a shithead
Well two of us have said it just today so you’ll have to update your assumption.
Steam is dogshit and it’s crazy they haven’t optimised it all in 20 years.
the steam client on my current windows system is using 115mb of ram. I don't care how long it takes to start up, i just start it and leave it running.
I said it back when they first migrated to Electron, and I'll say it again now. It's not the slowest thing ever by modern standards, but it's definitely not fast, either, and is pretty bloated in terms of memory usage.
It only looks good if you compare it to the Epic client, which somehow manages to be much worse.
I definitely don’t leave the resource hog Steam running, because it can be slow and terrible. I turned off Steam Overlay and Notifications to get substantial speed up improvements.
My guess based on the timing is that it is primarily for the Steam Frame. Steam is not just a game launcher but the entire desktop environment for the Steam Machine, the Steam Deck, and anything else like Bazzite that uses it as its primary UI as well. But in those cases, while at scale every second saved is nice, for the most part a second here or there doesn't really amount to that much.
But for the Steam Frame, which is probably booting while it is strapped to your face and completely obscuring your vision, every second is felt much more intensely. Anything that can be done to get to first interaction sooner has a much, much larger effect on the feel of the experience.
The speed would always have been nice to have, but it moves beyond "nice to have" for the Steam Frame case into having a significant effect on how it feels to use and the out-of-box experience. Yes, you'll use sleep most of the time, but when you do a full boot or reboot, you feel the seconds.
It was in the beta channel from some time now being updated and refined, steam is constantly updating the beta channel and promotes updates to general channel every now and then.
It was a planned update since long before. Just a coincidence in timelines.
They might've pushed it from beta to stable reactively, but an improvement to startup times was in their beta channel last month: https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4397053?emclan=103...
Good to know. I would have hated if Valve was capable of such optimization in 24h all this time but didn't if it wasn't to answer Epic.
They released it like a day or two after Epic right? That is quite a coincidence ...
From what I can see they actually started pushing the steam update to stable users before the epic tweet. And has been on the beta channel for weeks.
So I wonder if it's the other way round, Epic rushed out the boast because they knew the window that it would be even remotely correct to most users was closing.
The CEF update was baking in the public beta channel for around the last 6 weeks.
Epic could have benchmarked their beta client against the Steam beta client which would have shown this.
If I had a performance improvement ready for release, and my competitor started bragging about being faster, I'd for sure jump at the opportunity to release it sooner.
> Ok but why didn't they do it sooner? The Steam client is terrible and there is no excuse for it.
It's bad, but I wouldn't call it terrible.
It does have unresolved annoyances, like how context menus randomly stop working on Linux, and tweaking that setting (whose name I forget) on/off does little to fix them. You have to resort to using Big Picture mode, which is annoying. If they ever fix this, I'd have zero problems with the Steam client.
Mostly though I don't care about the client, I care about the games and they work seamlessly in Linux!
Most likely nobody complained and startup time isn't an important metric for them. The typical user may have Steam launch at startup or launch it once after booting their PC and then leave it running for days or weeks.
Personally, my longest and loudest complaint with steam is reliably putting a long hold on inputs when it starts up. If I launch steam on startup then I can't start doing anything else until it's done because it will jump on top of everything else when it feels like it. This is a particularly bad sin because this behavior is a way for credentials to leak.
Why is there no option to prevent it stealing focus?!?
I can honestly say I haven’t really had any issues with the client. Sure restoring from tray and starting are slow but other than that it’s been rock solid for me and for something that is mainly hosting a web view it’s nice that it doesn’t eat 1-3GB of memory in the background.
I’m curious what issues you have run into that you consider it terrible?
Disagree. It does what I need it to do. The store might be slow but my games work great.
This is why software is slow and everything uses 2GB of RAM at idle: because nobody really cares.
I'm sure that AI made this speedup work much easier and quicker; probably just access to the monorepo and a prompt of "make the launcher boot up faster while changing no functionality. Keep track of before/after benchmark numbers" would be fine as long as you can get your co-workers to approve whatever diff gets spat out the end.
But either of these companies, presumably with dev teams of dozens-hundreds of SWEs, could have pointed to one of them 5 years go and said "spend the next 2 months optimizing the performance of the launcher" and would probably have gotten similar results.
I make my software fast and efficient mostly because I enjoy it. Absolutely nothing stopping web apps, Electron, everything else from being efficient, slim, and performant. It's just that the modicum of effort required to set that up was outweighed by the convenience of just importing and parsing the full 16MB icon cache and 13 unused analytics SDKs every pageload and not worrying about it.
> I'm sure that AI made this speedup work much easier and quicker; probably just access to the monorepo and a prompt of "make the launcher boot up faster while changing no functionality. Keep track of before/after benchmark numbers" would be fine as long as you can get your co-workers to approve whatever diff gets spat out the end.
Yup.
So, here's my relevant example of how "vibe coding" doesn't mean "not caring", an isochrone map generator, real time, about the same total download (in a private window) as Google maps is when looking at Berlin:
https://benwheatley.github.io/Isochrone/web/?region=berlin&n...
It almost certainly still has bugs. And the code itself is probably terrible, because LLMs don't always clean up when you tell them to remove everything related to a bug.
But it is a download that's 90% data, and does get you a real-time updates as you drag your origin around the largest city in the EU.
I have to say, Epics vibe is just malicious and toxic. Steam is silent and just lets things speak for themselves. What is the value of an idea if it does not work in the real world?
I just wish the people at Epic collectively took some vacation and came back with a less breathing down neck attitude towards everything. Just chill out, relax, it is a browser for searching, buying and downloading games
The messaging from Epic was antagonistic to users and disrespects the efforts the engineers put in to making this new client. "We vibecoded it" minimizes the fact that this almost certainly wasn't a one shot prompt and publish but that real people had to work on and test this before releasing it.
It felt like a message to investors rather than users.
Agreed, their entire communication relies on taking jabs at "the other guy". Just make a good product.
If you need to tell people you're better than someone, you probably aren't.
Valve can rely on their community to be malicious and toxic - for example, the post we're commenting under!
Thank you Epic for improving Steam! Appreciated
Epic is so bad that I rather pay for a game on Steam than getting it for free on their store.
So it's a D-measuring contest now? Also, I found the tone of the writing on that site, including the picture of Gabe Newell, kind of obnoxious.
It's an AI meme site. They don't do real reporting. That's why their source of how long it takes to open Steam is a single out of context clip with no comparison to anything else
There are broken windows everywhere I look when people are using AI, including the launcher. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory even with large companies the acceptance of small issues here and there is concerning.
Absolutely bonkers to brag about your app taking 5 _entire_ seconds to start...
App to launch apps is loading in little over 5s, on what I assume is high-end gaming pc.
Truly something to be proud of..
A decent nvme ssd can read ~35GB of data in 5 seconds for reference.
Or you can download 66MB of data on a 100mbit/s internet connection in 5 seconds.
Say you need to load 1gb from disk and need to download 1MB of data from internet. It should take ~75 milliseconds to do that.
It is incredibly slow, considering Valve is a billion dollar company. This level of optimization is closer to what you would expect from a person who is programming as a hobby.
And that's why having some competition is useful for consumers. I would like to see this trend to continue and game launchers improving not only startup times, but RAM usage and disk size usage. I just looked into my `.steam` directory, and it is taking up over 10GB of disk size, and I have only single game installed, that is only about 500MB in size.
Now patiently waiting for GOG answer to this competition.
I don't think this is a statement about competition. This is not a metric anyone has competed on so far, it's being made into a press release.
Totally unsurprising
> CEF
Ah that's the reason why they came up with an instant speedup. Optimising CEF is basically like docking a zero from your speedup loop [1]
[^1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop
When you vibe code and tell your agent to "keep working till everything loads inside 100 milliseconds", you end up with a super hideous codebase which does insane things like having a custom memory allocator, handwritten assembly, etc etc.
It is fast though!
what's wrong with any of these things though, both custom memory allocators and handwritten assembly have their place
do you really care if it's working and it's reliable? (i.e. not an overfit to the current data)
I had suspected that they simply invoked client ready faster and let misc information fetch in background. After a little bit of reversing they did infact just make the client spawn earlier.
Steam client was always fast, majority of load time is (and forever will be) network speed.
> Your country is not allowed to access this resource
What’s the issue they have with South Africa?
What are the possibilities of AI learning how to code efficient apps, e.g. low memory apps, or faster apps, or both? I feel like that is the kind of cheap work that requires too much intelligence for humans, yet provides immense benefits to users.
Just recently I learned Listary has a new beta written in Rust. It is fast! The previous one kept crashing. Asking AI to code Rust style, is probably a shortcut method.
I've been using Rare for a couple of years, never had a problem. It's much more lightweight and fast.
https://github.com/RareDevs/Rare
I think vibe coding will force everyone to stay on their toes and keep being at the edge, moat defences have lowered and competition is up, as consumers we will get much better products for much cheaper. Let's just hope there is enough people left with jobs to pay for the services and the others can re-invent theirselves in a career that is still valuable in an LLM world.
If this is the start of epic competing on features and quality for both devs and players instead of just buying up exclusive rights then I'm all for it
I don't know why anyone's assuming Valve isn't "vibe coding" too.
on the flipside, it takes longer to start the steam client than it does to load and start the first level in half life
Next let's review their RAM usage while idle, shall we?
The problem with advertising "vibe coding" is that anyone can do it.
Can we stop putting Chrome in everything? Why does it take billions of instructions and hundreds of thousands to billions of bytes of RAM to display some text and pictures?
Fair question, but there is a decent answer. It's because Steam is an app that is shipped to 3 platforms and at least 2 architectures; the web platform is a platform- and architecture-agnostic target; and there is an extremely large set of tools and large developer pool to pull from. It may not be the set of you trade-offs you would have chosen, but it's also a reasonable choice for the problem they are tackling with the set of real-world constraints they are presented with.
Ok so they can write it for Windows only then tell Claude to convert it. Even back then, the thing's only job was downloading and running games.
Valve: “thank God we are paying (checks notes) hundreds of thousands to be .5 seconds faster on a desktop app boot. Let’s push out the marketing material!”
that is great and all but why was it slow previously
Not that it's specifically relevant to this but it's bloody terrible that we need any launcher at all. A whole generation is barely even aware that you used to able to buy and play a game without an online middleman sitting on your computer.
epic games can build a launcher that has hard coded bytes and runs on it's own localized cpu space and I would still use steam
Does “ai assisted” count as an architecture?
That table has classic "arbitrary LLM comparison" smell.
Not sure why this is even a comparison. Steam Client has been optimized over years of development and updates.
It may be faster than Epic, but it is still unreasonably slow for something that really does very little at the end of the day. It's quite tragic that the company that brought us Proton and Windows games on Linux at near equal performance can't do a better job with the client or can't be bothered to improve it. That, and the decades old bugs in Half Life, Left 4 Dead and other classic games that probably still generate not insignificant revenue.
At the end of the day, software speed wars are a good thing for the end users.
Epic will do anything to beat Valve, apart from actually being better than Valve
Epic Games seems desperate in its attempts to make gamers like AI.
How about actually testing both launchers on same device or at least give startup numbers of steam before/after update? So annoyed by this "comparison" honestly.
This website is just reddit at this point. No one reads the article, no one cares about what is actually true , everyone is just giving their own anecdotes about some random shit.
This article is completely worthless and contains zero useful information, no conclusions about anything can be derived from it.
From my own testing the Epic launcher is still significantly faster than steam at launch, but I do not know if I have gotten the update or if its on a beta branch.
Presumably people here understand how software profiling or whatever works, why can no one here see how obviously nonsensical the reporting here is.
Indeed. Steam updates every time I open it. When visiting family with slower internet that 100MB+ update takes a while just to download.
First real-world evidence that AI is improving productivity?
I bet they just removed a wait(5s) from their client :D
No, that's Microsoft's approach.
Like when they made two generations of XBox consoles boot 5 seconds faster by making the unskippable boot animation 5 seconds shorter. Many years after the exact same issue bottlenecked Windows 7 boot times on SSDs.
Public shaming works.
Great. Now make it not need a constantly running process, and not using GB of memory when I forget to close it. May not be a big deal on a desktop, but on a laptop having this kind of bloat is obnoxious.
They would have to rewrite the app and use Tauri/WebView2 or native code. CEF blows up your memory use because you ship a whole ass Chromium browser.
You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though. It's just how they work, you need to keep track of play time and respond to any API calls from the game. But it could be a native background daemon instead of two Steam Web Helpers.
> You can't really avoid a long running process for a game launcher though
I disagree. I get that steam has useful features I want while in-game (e.g. invite a friend to play), but there's no reason it couldn't just run this launcher only when a steam game is running and immediately exit once it's done.
Also, I think a lot of people forget how small well written software can be -- we're talking like single or double digit megabytes. Heck there's a whole linux distro that's under 20mb.
> They would have to rewrite the app and use Tauri/WebView2 or native code. CEF blows up your memory use because you ship a whole ass Chromium browser.
The only benefits of Tauri are the smaller application package and the fact that the runtime is always up to date (which can also be a downside). That full package doesn't live in RAM when it's running, so it's "merely" wasted disk space and not RAM. In terms of RAM it uses just as much as electron or CEF.
Turns out competition works!
It is incredibly funny that Steam could have fixed this at any time, but didn't prioritise doing so until Epic openly challenged them. This is why we can't have nice things™
They're posting this as some kind of gotcha against AI, as if Valve aren't using AI too.
This is a garbage article, lmao. Comparing architectures as "AI assisted (vibe coded)" and "Optimized modular CEF", and highlighting Steam as being faster in tray restore when it is slower.
Oct 13 source: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/593110/view/71003705...
Honestly, I have no idea what business Steam has starting for whopping 5 seconds as it is right now (after the 'speedup').
It is a simple shell for launching already downloaded apps. This is disgrace and nothing to boast about, especially considering Valve takes 30% cut of basically PC gaming marked for making it.
It's way more than this. Some may argue about how useful all of these features are, but Steam client is also a store (with lots of personalizations), a social network (forums, text and voice chat, personal profiles etc), a mod hosting platform, a game review site, a digital marketplace (cards and items. You may be surprised how popular this aspect is). It also does the controller remapping, manages cloud saves and screenshots/videos, allows to store games at several locations at ones. It provides games related news, checks for updates on all of the installed games.
Again, one may argue how useful all of this is, but it is there, and most users likely have the app on a OS startup anyway.
None of the is loaded on startup. It takes additional time to load any of those features after 5 seconds of starting up.
Why would features like cloud saves cause startup time to be long. That shouldn't be in the critical path.
Unlike nearly every other platform that takes a 30% cut, you're not forced to distribute on Steam.
Wow this is really the unthinking man's blog post. This is a known slop news site and HN should not allow it here. I like Steam, but at least Epic actually gave a comparison that we can interpret as two load times on the same PC. These metrics are completely useless without that.
Somebody clipping how long it takes Steam to open on their computer with no other context is pretty meaningless. For all we know, it's running slower on their computer today. There's no before/after, no comparison to Epic. Yet this article just confidently asserted the figure as universal. Moronic.
"avoid stealing focus..."
oh fucking hell, finally. thank you.
Welcome. Sadly right now the initial activation (when UI appears) can still be a noticeable time after process launch, and thus still feel a bit like a focus steal, but hopefully there will be improvements there soon.
Epic Games, Inc. owns the RAD Debugger source code yet instead of pointing the clanker (and/or their human(s)!!) at it and saying hey go make a instantaneously-launching high-performance modern library/storefront application based on that, instead they vibecoded up yet another Modern Web Stack travesty that still takes plural seconds to launch—and they have the gall to brag about it as though this is some kind of massive achievement?!
Like, awesome, at least the freaking game launcher/storefront experience is no longer an Unreal Engine game—great work guys, huge improvement, now it's not a total shitshow of unimaginable ineptitude, just a regular, run-of-the-mill shitshow. But that's hardly worth patting yourselves on the back about!
I really hate all these gaming related wars. I liked it better when arguing about stuff like this was regarded as juvenile. It’s a sign of our times I guess, grown men so withdrawn from the system that these sort of battles are front and center to a lot of them.
Wake me up when it stops going blank when I have two monitors with different scaling factors. [1]
1: https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/4299321840544...
Nobody asked for this! We just want more, better and cheaper games! That's it. I could care less how quick it takes to launch an app which then stays open for hours/days.
>I could care less
borderline murderous eyetwitch
I was in my 30s before I understood that people say "could care less" when they mean "couldn't care less." I'll never understand how people can say it without wanting to claw out their larynx as badly as it makes me want to claw out my eardrums, but I'm gradually learning acceptance -- and how not to let my horror show on my face.
Sorry! At least you know this was "human written".
Hah, thanks for being human! No need to apologize. This is definitely a "me" problem.
This doesn't bother me nearly as much as people who misuse the word "literally". ugh I hate it.
I think probably some people asked for this, but they're just not you.
Nobody asked for this!
This feels like a strange argument given site we are on. "Why are applications so slow and bloated these days" has been a pretty constant complaint around here for many, many years.
Do you really think that the developers in charge of maintaining the client have absolutely anything to do with 'more, better and cheaper games'?
How are you twisting more efficient software into a bad thing?
The 'vibe coded' part needs to go. Both teams likely used AI-assisted coding. Neither team's product was completed by robots, not with current tech. Epic had the launcher update ready in advance to handle the bad PR from their announcement. Prepare for more announcements from Epic how AI and not humans solved something.
The industry is trying to sanitize this term to be synonymous with AI-assisted coding and I hate it. They are trying to blur the lines between skilled engineers who use AI, and everyone else.