Epic Games Store announces total redesign with reviews, profiles and launcher 5 times faster

Epic Games presented this Wednesday, June 18 one of the biggest renovations in the history of its PC store. During Unreal Fest in Chicago – as part of the annual event focused on Unreal Engine – the company unveiled a roadmap that includes a complete redesign of the Epic Games Store, long-demanded social features and a Launcher V2 rebuilt from the ground up. The information, initially spread by accounts such as @Pirat_Nation and collected by media such as VGC e IGN, aims to close the gap with Steam in discovery, community and performance.

The Epic Games Store turns seven years old in 2026. Despite exclusives, weekly free games, and a 12% developer commission, the platform still lacks basic features that Steam has offered for more than a decade. Epic acknowledges this in its own slides: "Every developer in this room and every player we have has experienced problems with the current launcher — it's time for a change."

A store designed to discover, not just to buy

The centerpiece of the redesign is the personalized home screen. Epic promises recommendations tailored to the user's tastes, quick-access categories, and a scrollable hero section with featured titles. Product sheets are no longer static lists but become dynamic pages that connect with communities, narrative content and player progression data.

According to the summary published in X, the most visible news includes:

• Personalized recommendations on the main screen.
• Written reviews from players — absent since the store launched in 2018.
• Player profiles with avatars, level, achievements and featured games.
• Universal support for Xbox and PlayStation controllers within the launcher.
• Patch notes from third-party developers integrated into the game sheet.
• Compatibility tool to check how a title will run on your PC.
• Cross-region giveaways and publisher-funded coupons.

«Epic Games Store will receive a big update with a redesign of the store to make it easier to find games. The new home screen will have better personalized recommendations and quick categories to explore."

Launcher V2: performance as a priority

In parallel with the store, Epic rebuilds the Epic Games Launcher from scratch. The company puts the improvements into concrete figures: cold boot 5 times faster on average and library restore from the system tray 6.5 times faster, according to VideoCardz. It is a direct response to one of the community's most repeated complaints: slow navigation, pages that take time to load, and a feeling of heaviness compared to rival clients.

A private beta of Launcher V2 will arrive "soon", ahead of a public launch planned in the "Up Next" phase of the roadmap. Epic had already confirmed in early 2026 that it was rebuilding the underlying architecture of the client; now set deadlines and metrics.

Features that Steam had been offering for years

The irony does not go unnoticed. Media such as Kotaku have pointed out that much of the list—reviews, profiles, improved discovery, patch notes—replicates capabilities that Valve implemented years ago. Epic assumes this as a competitive necessity: it does not seek to be the number one store on PC—Tim Sweeney has ruled this out repeatedly—but it does seek to reduce friction for players and developers who already use the platform for exclusives, revenue share agreements or the famous weekly free games.

Other elements go beyond the tracing. Fortnite's in-store performance checker, publisher-funded coupons and block installation point to specific problems in the Epic ecosystem. The Epic Parties—group chat independent of the game—and pre-registration for F2P complete a social package that the company wants to decouple from individual titles.

Careful expectations

Epic has a history of incremental promises. Features announced in previous presentations have taken months—sometimes years—to materialize. KitGuru warns against assuming that everything will arrive within the 12-month period. Even so, the June 18 announcement marks a change in tone: for the first time, Epic groups store, launcher and social into a single roadmap under the umbrella of a comprehensive reconstruction.

For the PC player, the test will come with the Launcher V2 beta and the redesign of the home. If Epic meets the performance numbers and activates reviews and profiles, the store will stop feeling like a minimal storefront and will move closer to the standard that Steam set a decade ago. The question is not whether the features are desirable—they are—but whether the company will deliver them on time this time.