Metro Exodus forms part of a landscape of exclusives as Epic Games' PC store stakes out new territory. — AFP Relaxnews
Fortnite company Epic Games is bolstering its arsenal against traditionally dominant PC store Steam, securing a one-year exclusive on February's well-anticipated action game Metro Exodus.
PC gamers with existing pre-orders for Metro Exodus will still receive their game through the Steam storefront, but the Epic Games Store will house the post-apocalyptic action adventure from now through its Feb 15 release, and all the way until Feb 14, 2020.
All post-release content for the single-player game will be distributed via both platforms, but the coup means that even before March's blockbuster in waiting, Ubisoft's The Division 2, Epic Games has secured another big name exclusive.
The enormous revenue derived from Epic turning building and monster-fighting Fortnite: Save The World into Fortnite: Battle Royale, a free, technically solid, and absurdly polished riff on the popular last-person-standing genre, resulted in favourable terms for studios signing up for the Epic Games Store – an 88% cut of revenue, rather than Steam's standard 70% rate.
Indie storefront Itch.io allows developers to set their own rates, while Discord, branching out from its chat app origins, offers 90%; few can compete with Epic's potential audience.
Thanks to Fortnite, Epic already has upwards of 125 million pairs of eyeballs to present with Store content (June 2018 figure). By comparison, Steam had reached 150 million registered accounts in August 2017.
Granted, only a portion of those Fortnite players are on PC, given the game's spread across console and mobile, but Epic has plans for mobile games on its store too, and the industry as a whole anticipates a more device-agnostic, cloud gaming future. Few others have such a well-engaged potential audience.
Epic's approach is more aggressive than mere revenue cut as, while commonplace among rival console platforms, exclusivity has remained somewhat rare in the PC realm, generally restricted to Microsoft's Windows Store for Xbox-branded titles.
Yet here, independently-developed titles like Ashen, Hades, Rebel Galaxy Outlaw and Hello Neighbor: Hide & Seek were among the first batch revealed at December's Epic Games Store launch.
Then, an early January announcement upped the ante, nixing The Division 2 on Steam and landing on the Epic store instead; now Metro Exodus follows with a one-year deal.
As it happens, neither use Epic's development suite, the Unreal Engine; games that do must surely be on its hit list too. – AFP Relaxnews
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