The Epic Games Store has tapped up some major upcoming games as exclusives, among which a couple belong to Take-Two Interactive and its publishing labels. In particular, these are the Obsidian-developed The Outer Worlds, being published by Private Division, and Gearbox Software’s Borderlands 3, which is being published by 2K Games.
However, as per Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick in the company’s latest financial earnings call, signing exclusivity deals with the Epic Games Store isn’t something they will dabble in too often, echoing earlier statements made by himself not too long ago. Zelnick said that Take-Two will continue to support Steam with its upcoming titles, and even if they do sign exclusivity deals with Epic for their storefront, they will have relatively shorter durations.
“In terms of supporting the Epic Games Store, look, we think, as I said earlier, more distribution is a good thing,” said Zelnick. “And while it’s rare that we’ll do exclusives for any period of time, we will continue to support Steam with our titles. And these titles will be going to Steam relatively quickly after their initial availability exclusively on the Epic Games Store.”
Epic’s practices of tapping up exclusives is something that has drawn a lot of criticism from PC gaming audiences, but it doesn’t look like it’s something they’ll back down from, as their CEO Tim Sweeney has made abundantly clear multiple times. Borderlands 3 itself was the recipient of plenty of that criticism, with Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford getting involved in the controversy (again) and previous Borderlands titles getting review bombed on Steam.
That said, it doesn’t seem like exclusivity to the Epic Games Store has any adverse impact on games’ sales, so it should be interesting to see how major publishers approach the situation.