As someone who does not play Fortnite nor is using the Epic shop in any way, and is just using the Engine to develop own games, I agree on this request. The first thing I did was to hide the games library and shop - which made the launcher start up much faster.
But it still feels unnecessary to have it and I would very much love to be able to simply install a seperated, minimalistic “gamedev” version of the launcher without all the bloat that comes with the games part.
The only other option I have right now is to block the internet access for the launcher, and only allow it whenever I need to download something.
Block the launcher from auto-launching by doing this.
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Launch projects either from shortcuts … or directly from C:\Users<user>\Documents\Unreal Projects … or have a shortcut of the UE4Editor.exe and launch that to choose which project you wish to open without needing the launcher for that.
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Create new projects by either launching one of your existing projects, and go to File → New project…
Or launch the UE4Editor.exe directly from “C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_4.22\Engine\Binaries\Win64\UE4Editor.exe” (or so)
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You can surely wait when it comes to updating ue4 versions or installing new plugins to the engine via the launcher, if there is a small delay with the servers.