CEO of Epic Games Tim Sweeney has stated that the company will continue to sign and fun exclusivity deals with developers and publishers regardless of any commitments they have on Steam.
In a series of tweets this week, Tim also said that since the Game Developer Conference (GDC), the company has had a lot of internal discussion, which has led to the change in opinion.
We’ve had a lot of discussions about this since GDC. Epic is open to continuing to sign funding/exclusivity deals with willing developers and publishers regardless of their previous plans or announcements around Steam.
Previously, the director of Epic Games’ publishing had said that the company would eventually stop courting exclusives, especially ones that were already available for sale on Steam. Tim Sweeney’s new comment has said that may not be the case after all, and the company would indeed still go for exclusive deals, regardless if they are on Steam or not.
We've had a lot of discussions about this since GDC. Epic is open to continuing to sign funding / exclusivity deals with willing developers and publishers regardless of their previous plans or announcements around Steam.
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) April 1, 2019
During a talk about the Epic Games Store, both heads of the Epic Games store Joe Kreiner and Steve Allison, and head of business development for the store, said that the company expected some pushback from the community when Metro: Exodus was announced as an Epic Games Store exclusive. The game was available for pre-order on Steam, and then pulled from Steam and made an Epic Game Store exclusive. They said they were caught off guard by how bad it got, and that it was a misstep.
Now we’re live and we have a view out in time, and we can work with everybody … We have a case study where it says ‘maybe we should make our decisions earlier,’ and we will. [We] will definitely not be doing [exclusives] on the scale we’re doing them now.
Epic Games has several upcoming exclusives signed up that include Remedy’s Control, many major PC releases from Ubisoft, upcoming Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds, and the recently announced Borderlands 3 which is coming as an exclusive on Epic Games Store for 6 months following its release on September 13.
What do you think of Epic going back on its word and still looking to snag games from Steam to make them Epic exclusives? Let us know what you think. Post your comments below.
