Slow downloads in Epic Games Launcher

UPDATE 2024 DEC 09: I no longer think this is necessary. The Epic Lanucher is doing much better today than back then.

I bought a brand new shiny game from the Epic Store. Started the download and left the computer, expecting the game downloaded and install after a few hours. To my dismay the download made very little progress over the next eight hours.

As a Steam user I expected the download to max out my network connection. Not so for Epic Games Launcher. The download speed was a miserable few bytes per second.

A quick Internet search reveals I’m not alone with this problem.

I think the Epic Games Launcher downloads in tiny tiny chunks. The default configuration tries to download one or two chunks simultaneously. This is probably fine for most people. But not in my case. Each chunk takes a few seconds to download and since they are tiny the overall progress is insignificant.

Fortunately, we can reconfigure the Epic Games Launcher to download many chunks in parallel. Lets try downloading 99 chunks simultaneously.

The solution

Start by closing the Epic Games Launcher if its already running.

Open Notepad and then open this file:

%LocalAppData%\EpicGamesLauncher\Saved\Config\Windows\Engine.ini

It’s empty.

Paste the following lines and save the file:

[Portal.BuildPatch]
ChunkDownloads=99

You can now start the Epic Games Launcher and resume the download.

Notes

The technical accuracy in this article is low. I don’t know for sure that Epic Games Launcher downloads in tiny chunks. I think it does. Furthermore, I spent five minutes searching the Internet and didn’t find a solution that worked. This worked for me. I hope it works for you. If your computer explodes, don’t blame me.