Epic Games CEO clarifies position about store exclusivity

A few weeks back, Epic Games' Steve Allison spoke to PCWorld about the exclusive deals it was striking with publishers to get games on its platform. Allison stated, "We will definitely not be doing exclusives at this scale for a long period of time." A few days after that statement, Epic signed a deal with the developers behind Observation that was essentially a repeat of the situation with Metro Exodus.

In response to a fan inquiry on Twitter about the matter, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said, "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." Referring back to Allison's stance, Sweeney continued, "This prompted further discussions at Epic, leading to the realization that these calls must be up to developers and publishers, and Epic wouldn't tell them "no" on account of existing statements made about Steam."

To clarify, this all happened before Gearbox's announcement of Borderlands 3 being exclusive to Epic's storefront for six months this morning. So despite previously claiming that it would be backing off on gathering so many exclusives, Epic is now ready to take more exclusives. And the world keeps turning...