Steam continues to enforce their near monopoly by simply not screwing up as much as the competition.
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Holy shit, that's a real tweet...
Epic is launchermaxxing.
The only good thing about the Epic Games store is that it doesn't/didn't force you to update. I haven't updated the launcher in years.
If steam could have been faster all along, whyβd they wait to implement it?
Does this assume Valve doesn't use AI for development?
Thereβs using AI for development, and then thereβs proudly announcing that 100% of your product is vibecoded (which is what Epic did)
One thing that i like about epic, is that it allows using third party launcher for downloading, installing and playing games. Compared to steam, where every game must be downloaded through official client, and some games just does not work without steam running in the background.
Maybe Steam should make their Game Engine free, public, and open source?
Steam actually put out their update first. Epic had already lost their one point before they even released it
This certainly seems like Steam already had a bug open for startup performance, but it was always a lower priority than other things (because it wasn't a breaking issue, and startup was still generally fine) so it was just never addressed. It may even have had a partial fix that hadn't been shipped yet, waiting for another pass at it.
Once Epic tried to use that as an attack, they just fixed it as the low hanging fruit it was.
It was already in the Steam Client beta, improving performance of your application is just something you always look to do. It was in no way a response or anything to Epic Games.
wouldn't be surprised if all they did was defer some network traffic.
This meme gave me my morning chuckle and chortle before work. Thank you π
Well they can't vibe code away that random crash that's effected the launcher since day one...
effected
affected?
Tomato potato
Tomatoes and potatoes are different fruit
Potatoes aren't fruits, they're really soft rocks.
Since potatoes are mainly long chain carbs, they are actually not a fruit but a cereal/grain.
They're the same family, if you let a potato plant flower and bear fruits it'll have little cherry tomatoes looking fruits. Haven't tried eating that though. And it's harder to grow from seeds
They probably vibe wrote that comment.
its weird that people are using vibe to both indicate writen by ai, or writen off the cuff, you know, not writen by ai.
Come on guy
Which random crash? It's never crashed on me. Maybe it's a Windows thing that I wouldn't know about?
I just use epic for the free games, but with heroic launcher you don't even need to interact with anything but their webpage and download servers!
Steam update remind me of Meet the Heavy.
Valve comes in, put the patch note down, and sit down
"I am Valve."
hold the patch note in its hand
"And this is my patch note."
Somewhat related, I like the new update for Steam on Linux that uses the most recent stable Proton by default for exe files that are added rather than having to pick it from a list every time.
For its next trick, Valve should make Steam as performant as it was before they made it Electronslop.
it always had its own browser baked-in.. it was always slow.
it's just a bigger, slower pile of dung today than it used to be.
Is that literally what Epic tweeted??
No, they blogged it.. But it is a literal summary of what they wrote in that blog.
Programming is hard. So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher thatβs way faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look.
And then they showed the figures for their new launcher compared to Steams.
What the actual fuck π€£ Are we kidding right now? This blog post reads like an APRIL FOOLS JOKE, what is going on?!
In fact, the whole post reads like it was vibed out of a computer asshole as well.
You now accurately understand how fucking stupid almost all tech* CEOs and Department Heads actually are.
*well actually any kind of CEO or senior management that bought into the "AI is magic! We don't have to manage people or workflows anymore!" flavor of AI psychosis.
These people are largely incompetent buffoons with huge egos, who hate doing actual work, but must live a life like a baron of a medieval dominion, to sate their crushing need to feel special.
It's just so wild to admit that "we vibed it". That feels so unprofessional, wtf.
It is unprofessional.
These clowns only know how to act at 'professional', not actually be it. They are craven, the only thing that matters to them is power.
These are the same kind of people as in the Epstein files. We can see their casual flippance, their plotting, their neuroses, their goddamned constant spelling errors.
They're just fucked up idiots that people do not say "No" to!
Given that they didn't want to spend time developing good software, why'd we expect them to spend time writing tweets? That's to say, the tweets are probably vibed out of a computer arsehole as well.
advanced digital commerce technology such as a shopping cart.
oh boy, the author most have been smoking some good stuff xD
Programming is hard
Weird flex for a company that is supposedly taking money for programming. Interesting strategy to admit you are completely incompetent, rather than merely lazy.
Oh my god that is an actual quote, the very first line on their blog post.
The marketing team didn't get the memo that "vibe coding" is not a positive thing.
Programming is hard. So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new...
Holy fuck, they actually wrote that and put that out there for the world to see.
Programming is hardddd π
I always assumed vibe coding waw like the alur that people gave it. People use that in a professional setting?
Yes, in my experience its goes like:
me: " This is a problem for us"
them: "Your 'problem' is simple. I can fix it, easy. Here is the fix, you're welcome."
me: "Great! how does it work? how do we test it? did you get management to assign some resources for this?"
them: "oh, this was vibecoded, so I'm not providing support , maintenance or user testing - that's your job isn't it? Here's a 250-page 'documentation'. I haven't read it, but I ran it through a second LLM and asked that to fix any errors. So there's probably only a few left that you should be able to fix in a few minutes. "
me: " I will take up work on a farm administering anal suppositories to sick horses because that will be a thousand times more tolerable . . ."
them: " . . . by the way - it just operates using dummy data for now. You'll just need to link it in to the actual database before you release it."
So familiar. We had a requirement and said we would work it if management agreed, sales guy: "no need, I just vibed it", then confused as the very first person trying to use it fell over, and when they manually fixed the broken result, someone else demonstrated a critical vulnerability in the concept as vibed, even when working as 'intended'.
Whatever utility the new stuff can provide, it's not worth the collatoral bullshit. Maybe after the bubble bursts and people get bored of coding without actually understanding what is going on more sane usage can happen...
If they try to appeal to a certain AI-techbro/political segment because they have given up on ever reaching a general audience, then yes, some people do use that in a professional setting. It attracts that particular segment while it has the nice feature to repel everyone else.
It is a slur, but management got a hold of it and now it's everything. Enshittification means everything's shit now.
And there's even a very bad marketing department at Mistral (french company, only frontier lab at Europe) because they call "vibe" their coding harness. They don't even value their products, which is fine (they suck)
there are like different levels of vibe coding. like from "user just gives goal and AI does everything else" to "AI just does the repeatable boilerplate, but does not make any technical decisions and is heavily reviewed".
People use that in a professional setting?
Yes. Every level. Everything use of AI and vibecoding that you can imagine is used in a professional setting. Sometimes it happens because individual employees are lazy. Sometimes the company actively embraces it
The funniest thing here is that a company that has been making software for more 30 years had to rely on automated tool to make a piece of software their programmers couldn't make.
As a programmer myself, I may be a bit biased, but there is little in this world that I'm more sure about than: this wasn't the programmers' fault. It was the management's fault. The management didn't let them improve it. And it was the management who made them use slop machines. The managers probably even thought in terms of "our coders can't fix this" all while tying the developers' hands. And it's very likely that "our coders can't fix this" was a huge part of their fucked-up rationale for forcing their developers to vibe code. But coders know how to code. Making things faster is their bread and butter. Or at least would be if the managers didn't stand in their way.
There's a certain belief among a lot of coders that a rewrite from scratch is never a good approach. "Don't rewrite, refactor." Take it in little chunks and ship-of-theseus your legacy spaghetti code nightmare into something that meets at least some reasonable standard of acceptable quality. They're not wrong per se, but I've many times made impassioned arguments to the contrary. Not because I don't think the "refactor" approach is better in an ideal world, but because our world isn't an ideal one and a rewrite from scratch is a vastly easier sell to a manager than "please can I take just apportion a tiny bit of my time to pay off a little tech debt?" If your dogma is "never rewrite, only refactor", your codebases will be a hopeless mess forever because the refactor never comes. Managers have egos, and a manager wants to have their name associated with "shiny new application" more than "a bunch of boring invisible grunt-work". (Which may not be boring to developers at all, but is boring to higher-up managers and business analysts.) But in this world of AI-psychosis-boggled CTOs, the calculus has changed. The C-levels are even more inclined to want a rewrite, but this time they want to either cut the developers out of the process completely or at least force them into the role of reverse centaur. It's a much dicier proposition these days to propose a rewrite.
I get that sometimes when people say "developers" or "programmers" (especially with video games), they really mean "the development studio" including management, level designers, artists, BSAs, etc. But it's an unfortunate trend.
In summary, tech workers need to unionize STAT. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk ramble.
It was probably more simple: it wasn't important.
Faster startup doesn't make you more money. Faster startup is a non-issue if you start on windows login. Faster startup would make people think they can close your app since it is easy to start back up. Faster startup costs time that developers could be spending on things to make you more money. Faster startup costs EA money and reduces income.
Have you been watching epic store since it came out?? They don't have programmers. There's no way. Which is, I think, the issue.
This reminds me of when Samsung kept taking potshots at Apple in their marketing and Apple just ignored it while the iPhone continued to be massively popular. It's like a one-sided "please acknowledge me!" rivalry.
(I still hate Apple btw)
As much as I like steam, this perfectly demonstrate how great competition is to improve stuff.
Now if only they would stop shooting themselves...
With how fast steam deployed this change, it had to have already been in the works for a while (dev time, testing, etc.). The only reason the Steam startup performance improvements are even news is that Epic decided to throw away more of what little credibility they have left to try to make Valve look bad, and failed enormously. Vibe coding isn't competition; it's lazy and a mistake.
Steam is barely competing, the update come before the Epic boast. Valve is really just doing their own thing.
So, for steam this was actually available from the 9th of september in a Beta version of the client. And wasnt exactly pushed out as an update to spite epic, it is just part of a much bigger and more interesting update.
Can read the patch notes here - https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/710037059469839721
If they did a day early, it's probably not to beat the competition though
Not excusing Epic here, but TBH Steam was pretty bloated. It still is. Valve got too complacent with it.
Iβd really rather not have to run a ton of CPU/GPU/RAM-sapping churn in the background just to run a game. And if I do, at least make it leaner when minimized, not a full browser + a ton of other stuff.
Sounds like you need more RAM dog
I have 128GB. For my setup specifically, I'm more worried about background CPU/GPU usage causing hitches.
But we are in a RAM apocalypse, so people running games with barely enough RAM/VRAM will be fairly common these days.
It's not just bloated, it has a bunch of semi abandoned features and relatively simple bugs that they just don't care about fixing. Which is super weird. And I LIKE maximalism and features.
And as absolutely true as this post is, I also feel like this was a little corporate BM from valve. Which is concerning, given their position in the market; I don't want valve to turn into a machine that punches down. That's super toxic culture.
Just to clarify, because I have seen a lot of people not know this. This is part of a much bigger update, and has been in the public beta branch since the 9th of september. Steam aren't "punching down" or doing "corporate BM" in this case.
Indeed.
TBH I felt like Iβd get downvoted for saying this. Steam shouldnβt get a βpassβ for being a bloated launcher that has to run in the background. Which it is, even with this trimming.
Thing is, I still use the old Epic store. Yesterday I clicked the Store tab, and it opened it in a web browser. Twice. Only on the third attempt did it open in the actual application. This was before vibe coding got anywhere near it.
So i actually tried and timed my steam startup in CachyOS, it's about 5.9sec. Wanna know how Epic Launcher stack up? 2.9sec. Am kinda surprised at how fast it start up, but then i play around a bit and realise it's still as barebone as the old launcher, of course it's able to launch that fast. The real challenge they now have to face is to add features into the launcher and have it still launch as fast.
As for whether the game able to launch or not, i've yet to try, but i assume they'll just use Proton as their compatibility layer.
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