Metro Exodus Becomes an Epic Games Store Exclusive, Betraying Steam

Metro Exodus, the third game in the extremely popular Metro series (which, in turn, is based off an extremely popular book series) had a surprise announcement earlier this week: Deep Silver would be partnering with Epic Games to make Metro Exodus a one-year exclusive to the Epic Games Store.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney boasted about the deal:

“Metro Exodus is amazing and is deservedly one of the most anticipated PC titles of 2019. We are partnering with Deep Silver to launch Metro Exodus, underpinned by Epic’s marketing support and commitment to offering an 88% revenue split, enabling game creators to further reinvest in building great games and improving the economics of game stores for everybody.”

At this point, the Epic Games Store has been getting so many exclusives it hardly qualifies as news, even it is a big, highly-anticipated triple-A game like Metro Exodus. But what really gives this news story the dramatic flair we crave is that technically, Metro Exodus has been on sale over on Steam for a long time now, as a pre-order.

And Steam is not happy about this sudden betrayal. So much so it even wrote on the Metro Exodus steam page:

“We think the decision to remove the game is unfair to Steam customers, especially after a long pre-sale period. We apologize to Steam customers that were expecting it to be available for sale through the February 15th release date, but we were only recently informed of the decision and given limited time to let everyone know.”

The good news is that Epic Games and Deep Silver intends to honor any Steam pre-orders on the Epic Games Store. The bad news… is yeah, Valve is right. I’m not fan of Steam, but this is super unfair to Steam users who had pre-ordered game, expecting to play it on the platform of their choice. And in some respect… this kind of feels like this hypothetical war between Steam and the Epic Store has finally drawn blood.

The question now is if Steam will retaliate.