Steam Client startup time drops to 5.23 seconds, beating Epic Games Launcher

Valve made an update to the Steam client which reduces the time it takes to launch to a respectable 5.23 seconds. This is going to directly affect your ability as a gamer to get into your game library. As a result of this bump in performance, for a brief period of time Steam can actually beat the newly released Epic Games Launcher when measuring for startup times. For gamers who value having their games start quickly, this will be an instant noticeable change the moment they first run the app.

Valve update halves launch time and stops window focus stealing

For those that have felt frustrated by the slow launch times of the old Steam client, this recent update will remedy that. Valve made sure to note directly that "Improved Steam Client startup performance" is a change that is taking place. This specific optimization is focused on the essential experience of getting the desktop client application opened on Windows.

Recently, Epic Games highlighted the fact that their new launcher would open in 5.47 seconds. That was a 1.8x faster load time than Steam's previous load times of 10.07 seconds. But with the new update to the Steam client, it's now loading at 5.23 seconds as per independent tests from various users.

So, in fact, it's just a little bit faster than what Epic said. It's an interesting race between the big digital distribution platforms.

Also in this Steam update is a change in behavior which makes sure the Steam client doesn't try to take over your focus while it's launching. That's another improvement that makes sure that you don't get interrupted as much when using the desktop while running other applications. The startup time, while an important part of the overall story, is not the only part of this change to the client's behavior that makes it more usable.

We covered the last update for Steam Client and it had some of the same types of balance/stability issues coming into play. This new update continues with that trend of just tweaking the core performance aspects instead of big new features. So, the update is now available to everyone that uses Steam on supported platforms.