Valve Pushes An Update That Makes Steam Boot Up Faster Than Epic Games Launcher

Valve recently pushed out a Steam Client update that significantly improved the platform’s boot-up time. It’s so fast, in fact, it starts up within sub-five seconds.

How Is This Important?

this is such a good day to be a sweeney hater.. not even 24h later lmao https://t.co/hjf5Q9NV3C pic.twitter.com/XXLcIqYTT7

— dea (@girlglock_) October 15, 2026

As per the finding from dea (@girlglock_), the recent Steam Client update basically allows the platform to boot up cold to the main window in just 5.23 seconds. The change log simply states “Improved Steam Client startup performance”, and man, Valve wasn’t just whispering sweet nothings there.

As to why this matters (sort of), it actually goes back to an earlier post by Epic Games. The rival games platform to Valve’s posted on X a while back, declaring that its new launcher achieved a cold-boot time of 5.47 seconds. For context, that’s nearly half the downtime of Steam’s original 10-second boot-up sequence. It also claimed that it was 14% faster when restoring the launch from the system tray.

We vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher to be faster than the other guy.

Don't believe us? Test it out for yourself in Preview: https://t.co/pdtAeEIri4 pic.twitter.com/aMxojUUVPV

— Epic Games Store (@EpicGames) October 14, 2026

It also didn’t help that, in true Tim Sweeney fashion, Epic Games taunted its competitor with the message “programming is hard”, followed by a couple of graphs to back their supposed claim.

So, it’s pretty obvious that Valve is taking a punt towards the Unreal Engine owner and rival.

Not All Systems Are Created Equal

Image: Valve

It should be made clear that, while DEa’s sub-5-second boot-up demo of Steam looks legit, boot-up times of the Steam client post-update actually vary. Independent reports from users indicate that boot-up times actually range between five and seven seconds, and our testing leans closer to seven seconds. 0.47 seconds more, to be precise. Ultimately, it really depends on the machine you are running, plus the specs beneath the hood.

At the end of the day, though, and as dea said on X: it is a good day to be a Tim Sweeney hater.

(Source: TweakTown , dea via X )

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