For many, the Epic Games Launcher is a place to play Fortnite and claim free games. Apart from that, not a lot of hardcore gamers ever use the platform for any other reason. And one of the reasons for that is how slow and clunky the store is.
Even the company’s CEO, Tim Sweeny, has talked about the problems with the launcher. And now, Epic Games Store vice president Steven Allison also come out talking about the issues with the launcher.
Allison Talks About Epic Games
Allison admitted, “We have a lot of things we need to fix” about Epic Games during an interview with Eurogamer. He said,
We have needed to fix them for years. We’ve been really focused on developer tooling and all the things we do there. But last year, we finally started to point more of our resources towards player experience stuff, all the things that our players have needed, wanted, and all critics rightfully take us to task on.
“We got a lot of stuff out the door last year, and this year is going to be probably the best year for that stuff on the ‘big rocks’. And the big rocks are: the launcher sucks. Let’s call it what it is. It’s really slow
It makes calls to our back-end services to refresh every time you click around, and depending on your connection, you’ll have to wait a couple seconds. And that just doesn’t feel good, especially when people are comparing and contrasting and dual using one that doesn’t do that.
It’s nice to see the company taking accountability for the poor end-user experience. Epic Games does have the potential to be a big store if it can manage to fix the problems with it. There is a reason why Steam has been successful all these years, and that’s because it’s great for the end users.
Allison mentioned that they started working on the core app in December and are working diligently on improving the app. According to Allison, users should start seeing improvements by Summer.
It should start to feel good, be faster, and people be like, ‘Holy shit. It doesn’t suck so much.’ And that will be a win for us.
All of these points signal an improved store for the end users. The fact of the matter is, Epic Games offers a lot of neat benefits to the users, and if the company can somehow resolve the issues, it can quickly become a go-to launcher for many people.
They are also working on improving the social aspects of the app. Currently, there is no solid social framework within the app.
We have no social framework in the store, like other stores – even console platforms – [which] have the ability to communicate with your friends, and we just kind of stripped that out during Covid and never brought it back.
Allison mentioned that they are working to add “community spaces” to the Epic Games Store. This would basically allow you to customize your profile, add an avatar, and allow you to message other players on the store and on other platforms.
This is great news for Epic Games users; the company is actively working on this this year to improve the store and add long-wanted features.
