Other opinions about the storefront aside, the Epic Games Store launcher, on an experiential level, sucks. I’m not just being needlessly mean here, because this is the exact word Epic Games Store vice president and general manager Steven Allison used in a recent interview about the launcher, where he also detailed what you can expect from it over the course of the rest of the year.

“We have a lot of things we need to fix,” Allison told sibling site Eurogamer, going on to say that the company has “needed to fix them for years. We’ve been really focused on developer tooling and all the things we do there. But last year, we finally started to point more of our resources towards player experience stuff, all the things that our players have needed, wanted, and all critics rightfully take us to task on. We got a lot of stuff out the door last year, and this year is going to be probably the best year for that stuff on the ‘big rocks’. And the big rocks are: the launcher sucks. Let’s call it what it is. It’s really slow.”

Apparently work on the architecture of the launcher started in November 2025, with speed improvements set to arrive for users around May or June this year. “It should start to feel good, be faster and people be like, ‘Holy shit. It doesn’t suck so much.’ And that will be a win for us,” Allison said.

It’s not just a speedy store that Epic are working on. Right now, it has zero real social features, a stark contrast to Steam’s framework where each game comes with its own community hub and discussion pages. According to Allison, Epic are planning to add what they call “community spaces” to the store with things like avatars, player profiles, private messaging to cross-platform text chat, and voice chat, all of which should also be coming around May.

At some point in 2026, Epic will also be testing “a kind of forum-type experience,” though details beyond that are scant. Probably a safe bet to say it’ll just be a version of Steam’s discussion pages, but I suppose we’ll find out later this year!