Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney announced yesterday that the company is going for “maximum AI acceleration,” and the results are already evident. The new Epic Games Store, now available for testing, is openly vibe-coded because, apparently, “programming is hard.”
As the company itself explains, the new Epic Games Store is fully “vibe coded,” meaning all the work was done by AI programming agents rather than actual humans. The latter merely instructed the agents by typing prompts of what they wanted to get, with the happy little indentured bots performing exactly as they’re told. Of course, these bots constantly overengineer things and make mistakes a junior-level programmer wouldn’t, but that’s beside the point.
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Vibe-coding the entire store, Epic says, resulted in a piece of software that is faster and leaner than what it currently has to offer. In fact, it’s so proud of this slopfest that it’s openly taking shots at Steam by comparing load times between this new “program” and Valve’s flagship storefront. According to Epic, its AI-generated store loads up much quicker than Steam on a cold start (the first launch), and is, in fact, twice as fast.
But that’s definitely because of AI vibe-coding and not the fact that this new “store” lacks countless basic features, which Epic itself also admits. “This first release is light on features. Think of it as a speedboat and not a yacht,” the company wrote, again taking a clear shot at Valve’s Gabe Newell and his proclivity toward acquiring yachts for deep-sea exploration.
Steam, of course, still has a monumental community section filled with forums, discussions, news, and a workshop containing untold petabytes of mods for thousands upon thousands of games. And that’s on top of everything else that it provides, from an in-house recording feature, the Steam Big Picture mode, controller integration, and so on and so forth, none of which are contained in any of Epic’s stores, let alone this AI-generated one.
So I guess that, instead of focusing on cheap thrills and surface-level jealousy fuel, Epic should instead be investing its talents and resources into actually making a store worth downloading. And no amount of AI vibe-coding is going to solve that.
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