It is hard to believe, but it’s now been over 2 years since the launch of the Epic Games Store, a new storefront/launcher from Epic Games. While that event in and of itself wasn’t particularly noteworthy, as many major companies have storefronts and launchers nowadays, this store became something of a firestorm of controversy within the PC community for its use of buying third party exclusives to their launcher, something that was unheard of in that space in the past. Well, it doesn’t seem like that will be stopping anytime soon.
A representative of Epic Games spoke to PC Gamer about the exclusivity strategy. They said, “We have more exclusives coming in the next two years than we have published to date.” That seems pretty self explanatory. The exclusives that have come to the store range from the smaller indie titles to some very big games like Borderlands 3 that were exclusive for various amounts of time.
The third party exclusives and the copious free game giveaways have defined the store, and Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney once said he saw exclusives as key strategy in trying to carve a market against Steam, which has become something of a de facto standard on the PC platform. The company also announced that starting this week will be a new Epic Games Store Showcase coming to Twitch, so it’s possible we will see some of the exclusive announcements there. It was reported that the Epic Games Store had over 160 million users by the end of 2020.