Epic Games has released a new version of its launcher software intended to speed up and simplify the user experience for gamers across platforms and storefronts.
Today, October 14, Epic Games released a new version of the Epic Games Launcher rebuilt from the ground up with the goal of achieving faster start-up, navigation, and library loading times across Mac, Windows, and Linux. The new launcher allows for library load times up to 30 times faster than the previous version of the Epic Games Launcher, according to figures shared by a company representative, as well as cold boot-ups up to twice as fast and system-tray restoration up to 15 times faster.
The rebuilt Epic Games launcher includes new features like the Epic Parties social experience, which allows players to maintain a persistent voice chat with friends across games, a customizable navigation bar, the ability to submit developer feedback directly in-app, and the ability to detect and access installed games from platforms like Steam and the Xbox PC app, showing those games in the Epic Games Launcher library.
Epic is releasing the new Epic Games Launcher as a “preview,” which Epic Games Store general manager Martin Keely described as “in lieu of a beta” in an interview with GamesBeat. Epic has been teasing a significant update to its game launcher for months, with former Epic Games Store general manager Steven Allison saying “the launcher sucks” in an interview with Eurogamer in February 2026.
“It’s going to be available globally to people; we’re not going to force it on anyone,” Keely said. “It’s those who are motivated to sign up, download, and install, and eventually, we’ll do a cut over, so that this is the experience going forward.”
Epic Games representatives declined to provide a specific timeline for the deprecation of the legacy Epic Games Launcher, but made it clear that the goal is to completely replace the legacy launcher with the new version of the launcher at some point, avoiding an “old Reddit” situation, wherein a previous user experience lingers for years after being deprecated. Users who install the new launcher will be able to migrate their data from the legacy version, including installed games, settings, and cloud save data.
“We will make a cut over at some point, and all you can download is the new launcher, and everyone will be updated,” Keely said. “We’ll see exactly how quickly we’re ready, but it will be soon.”
The new Epic Games Launcher will support users who want to play Fortnite on Linux, which company representatives said will become available once Epic is satisfied that a “critical mass” of distro maintainers — groups responsible for publishing a version of Linux — have satisfied Epic’s security requirements. In a technical blog published today, Epic emphasized the importance of implementing its Easy Anti-Cheat security service across the most popular Linux distributions, noting the rise of cheating activity across both Epic titles and games in general. Epic representatives declined to provide a specific timeline for when Fortnite will be available natively on Linux.
“It won’t work on every Linux distribution; there’s a set of security features and things like that that we’re targeting that covers a lot of distributions, but doesn’t cover all of them, so we’ll be working through that,” said Epic Games engineering director Rick Deist in an interview with GamesBeat. “Part of the blog post we’re putting out is how we’re starting to collaborate with and build partnerships with different Linux distribution maintainers to try and expand the set of compatibility there.”