Epic Games doesn't want to repeat the Metro Exodus incident
Epic Games has been signing exclusive deals for its PC store left and right, but one in particular stuck out the most.
That being, of course, the Metro Exodus situation. In case you're unfamiliar, Metro Exodus had been available for sale on Steam for months, before it was abruptly removed in favour of an exclusive release on the Epic Games Store.
Many who expected to buy the game on Steam were left in the cold, though publisher Deep Silver did honour existing pre-orders. At GDC this week, Epic was asked about the whole situation.
"We don't want to do that ever again," said Epic Games Store head Steve Allison, as reported by PC Gamer.
"We had been talking to those guys for a number of months and they made some decisions on their end - this is not a throw under the bus thing, it's just the timing of where that came together and what was important to their business - we decided to do it together, we both knew there was the potential for the thing that happened in terms of communication."
Allison added that it ended up being "bigger than we thought", and felt worse. "We spent time talking ... 'We will never do this again in this way,'" he added.
"And I think we're not in a situation now where that could ever happen, because 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."
With that in mind, Allison revealed that Epic won't be making these exclusive deals forever.
Since the Metro Exodus deal, Epic continued to sign exclusives, more recently announcing a slate of high-profile games due out this year.
Some of those games had Steam pages, but none so far were available for sale before they deiced to jump ship. At least in Metro Exodus' case, the the deal helped sales at launch.