Overview
- Epic presented a three-stage roadmap Thursday at Unreal Fest in Chicago that shows a ground-up rebuild of the Epic Games Store and a new Epic Games Launcher V2 with slides shared by attendees on Reddit.
- Epic’s slides claim Launcher V2 will start up about five times faster from cold and restore from the system tray up to 6.5 times faster, but those numbers come from internal tests on very high-end hardware and await public validation during the beta.
- The roadmap’s immediate “Up First” items list a storefront rearchitecture, a private Launcher V2 beta, in-store patch notes, cross-region gifting, Fortnite chunked installation and pre-registration for free-to-play games.
- Planned later steps include a public launcher beta, a redesigned personalized storefront, user-written reviews, player profiles and avatars, universal controller support and third-party community tools, all scheduled over roughly the next 12 months.
- The rebuild follows Epic Store leadership admitting the current launcher “sucks,” reflects years of investment to close feature gaps with Steam, and could change how users find, install and discuss games if the promised speed and features arrive in public betas.