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No Steam, No Problem: 'Metro: Exodus' Sells Huge On The Epic Store, Epic Announces New Exclusives

This article is more than 5 years old.

Credit: Deep Silver

If ever you needed more proof that loud promises of internet boycotts doesn't always, or ever, translate into actual problems for actual companies, here we go. Metro: Exodus managed to put up some impressive sales numbers despite the widespread backlash against Deep Silver's decision to move Metro: Exodus from Steam to the Epic Games Store and cries of "no steam, no sale". The game sold 2.5 times as much as its predecessor, Metro: Last Light did on Steam. As a test case it's good news for Epic and the developers itching to move off of Steam.

So not only did Metro: Exodus make more money selling on Epic, Deep Silver got to keep a significantly larger chunk of that money. Valve takes a baseline 30% cut of all Steam sales, with that number dropping as low as 20% for top earners. Epic, on the other hand, takes only 12%, and also throws in the Unreal Engine license for free if a developer chooses to use it. If you want to know why developers are interested in the Epic Games Store, that's why.

It was a big day for Epic announcements here at GDC. In addition to showing off those test-case numbers, Epic also announced a slew of hotly-anticipated gaming coming to the store, titles like Obsidian's The Outer Worlds, Remedy's ControlThe Sinking City, Afterparty, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, and more.

Epic even managed to snag a trio of Quantic Dream games that had been PlayStation exclusives until just now: Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls and Detroit: Become Human. It's an impressive showing for a new platform, and it doesn't look like it's slowing down.

Valve enjoyed a virtual monopoly in PC games for years, and made a gigantic amount of money doing so. We are getting close, however, to declaring that era officially over. No matter what happens with the Epic Games store, developers large and small appear to have decided that trading 30% of their revenue for limited visibility on a crowded store just wasn't working for them, and it's unlikely that we're ever going to return to the status quo as of 2017.