Those who game on laptops will forever battle with battery life, even though gaming laptops have gotten much better over the past few years. Gaming on a laptop means doing everything humanly possible to try to get the most life out of your system possible. Bad news for Fortnite players, it turns out that the Epic Games store may be draining more power from your laptop than you thought.

This is according to PCW's testing of a Microsoft Surface Pro 7+ with the new 11th generation Tiger Lake processor. After inconsistent results in battery testing, they found that the Epic Games Store app running hidden in the taskbar had a dramatic impact on the tablet's battery life.

The PCWorld article details the entire testing methodology, but to see how Epic's platform affects PCs, they performed a battery test in Airplane Mode on two systems, with EGS on/off, signed in and running, signed off and running, and

The Pro 7+ showed an average of 20% (about 2 hours) and the Ryzen-powered Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 showed an average of 8% less battery life. While all open applications consume a bit of battery power, we were surprised by the amount of usage in the Epic Game Store.

The same test was performed with the Steam app running in the background, with little impact on battery life; Epic responded to PC World's findings via email, "In general, we are actively working to improve launcher performance and reduce power consumption."

and responded via email, "We are working on improving launcher performance and reducing power consumption.

More severe battery drain appears to be an issue with the new Tiger Lake systems or Surface Pro tablets in general. However, as shown on Ryzen systems, the Epic launcher can affect performance on non-Tiger Lake systems as well, even running in the background.

So what can be done in the immediate future to maximize laptop battery life? Make sure the Epic Games Store and any other apps you are not using are not running in the background. Always check the system tray.