When it launched in December 2018, the Epic Games Store was not well received by many gamers, who viewed Epic Games’ large number of exclusivity deals as too aggressive and an unwelcome limitation on their ability to choose where to purchase games. More than two years later, the controversy continues, even while the digital storefront thrives and the company promises more Epic Games Store exclusivity deals to come.
When the Epic Games Store launched, it was missing many of the quality-of-life features gamers had become accustomed to on Steam. There was no shopping cart, no rating system, and some users claimed the Epic Games Launcher put an excessive load on their CPUs, resulting in higher idle temperatures than usual.
While a hotfix was quickly released to fix the CPU issue, online magazine PC World may have uncovered another problem with the Epic Games Store’s launcher that causes it to excessively drain the batteries of certain devices.
The discovery came about when testers at PC World wanted to run a few battery life tests to see how well a Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ tablet with an Intel Tiger Lake processor could handle games. The first two tests had similar results but, after that, test after test gave inconsistent scores. In frustration, the team rebooted the tablet and started over, once again getting consistent results similar to those of the first two tests.
This anomaly caused the team to divert their attention to figuring out why so many of the test results had diverged from the norm. They discovered that the only thing that seemed to have changed was the Epic Games Launcher, running in the background and hidden in the taskbar. The launcher had been used to download the games they were using for their tests and had to remain running to play those games.
When testing for battery life, the team makes sure to shut down background processes—benchmark software, other games, antivirus programs — or doesn’t install them on devices at all. They performed another round of battery life tests, first with a factory reset device and then with the Epic Games Launcher in different scenarios, such as running in the background, with the window active, signed into the Store, signed out of the Store, and manually shut down.
The results showed that their test device’s battery life dropped by an average of 20 percent when the Epic Games Launcher was running. They then performed similar tests on a laptop with an AMD Ryzen CPU, and the battery drain was only 8 percent higher with the Epic Games Store launcher running. This led the team to conclude that the excessive battery drain may be limited to devices using Intel’s new Tiger Lake CPU. Further testing will be required to confirm this.
Source: PC World
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