Unreasonably high CO2 footprint of Epic Games Launcher

For me, Epic Games Launcher averaged 0.09% CPU usage this year overall, including when not running, which imho is unacceptable for the functionality it offers. Extrapolating to millions of users I imagine there are quite a few power plants running just for it. Obviously this pales to UE itself. The difference is that Launcher doesn’t really do anything for me most of the time. I would like to start the Launcher by myself when I need it but don’t want it to run every time I start a binary version of the editor. Is there a more formal way to disable it other than renaming the exe or using taskkill on editor startup?

As a side note regarding posting a new topic in the forum: “You must choose at least 1 tag” for “optional tags” is an oxymoron.

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Make a shortcut to your unreal project and you can bypass the launcher

I created a shortcut to the .uproject and the Launcher will still execute alongside the editor. Can you explain further what you mean?

There doesn’t seem to be a windows startup key anymore. Editing com.epicgames.launcher… does indeed work, however launcher magically fixes this once started manually.

The launcher has had an issue since at least 2016 where it will consume nearly a full cores worth of CPU power if you leave it open to the Unreal Library tab. It was never fixed, to this day the launcher pulls high power on the library tab for no apparent reason.

When I used to run on a 6700k I could always tell when I accidentally left the launcher open because my CPU fan would spin up to max speed to remind me.

The launcher frankly seems to be falling into disrepair, the Unreal marketplace has been completely unusable from within the launcher for me for over a year, the main page loads but nothing happens when clicking on anything…

I can only hope a major update is coming in the future.

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