Holy cow, the Epic Games Store supports preloading now

It's hard to believe I'm writing this in the year 2025 CE, but I've double-checked and it sure seems to be right so here we go: The Epic Games Store now supports preloading.

"Preloading is now available for PC pre-purchase products on the Epic Games Store!" developer Local Bald wrote in the Epic Games Store forums (via Reddit). "This new feature allows players to download titles they have pre-purchased up to five days (120 hours) prior to release via an encrypted build. Preloading ensures that players can jump into the game quickly on day one, which is especially beneficial for titles with large downloads."

Preloading is a practical feature but not very glamorous as these things go; what makes it notable here is that it's been available for years on Steam. Yet Epic, despite being hell-bent on breaking Steam's nigh-monopoly on the PC digital market, hasn't seen fit to add it until now.

And it's not as though Epic isn't aware that the absence of preloading, and other such mundane but useful features, is a problem. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and EGS general manager Steve Allison both acknowledged in May of this year that the Epic Store sucks—or, as Allison put it more politically, that "there's still a ton of work to be done to deliver a world-class experience."

He's not wrong, but as PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens noted at the time, the Epic Store went live in December 2018, which means it's almost seven years old now, yet it still lacks a lot of functionality that we take for granted on Steam. And that doesn't get into issues with the Epic launcher, which Sweeney said is "clunky," a characterization I would describe as a tremendous understatement.

Epic has built a user base for its store primarily through its extremely generous weekly game giveaways, which has cost the company untold truckloads of cash, but I can't help thinking that by now, the thrill has worn off and it's time to start pouring some of those resources into the store itself. It's a little weird to be thinking of preloading functionality as a significant improvement, but for the Epic Store it is—and hopefully we'll be seeing more such baseline functionality following soon.