Despite Outer Wilds being promised as a Steam game during its crowdfunding campaign, Mobius says it will now be an Epic Games Store exclusive on PC. It will also launch on Xbox One at the same time, but no update yet as to when that release date will be.
Presumably, the game will be a timed exclusive. The team said its goal is still to “… bring the game to your preferred platform as quickly as possible,” and it is well aware of the many concerns over Outer Wilds suddenly switching from Steam to EGS.
However, it seems there were issues behind the scenes backers weren’t privy to. The update mentions the team wasn’t always able to share everything that was going on during development, and there’s one particularly telling piece of information that sheds some light on funding possibly being an issue:
In other words, it appears Mobius struggled during development and needed some additional outside help to make Outer Wilds come to life. It’s not too surprising either, given how Epic positions itself as the developer’s helper.
Still, many backers, and PC gamers in general, are less than pleased with the move. A portion of gamers isn’t happy with the EGS at the moment, mostly due to its lack of features such as cloud saves, though also from concerns over its security.
Another issue is how it doesn’t support Linux and isn’t available in all countries.
Still, the EGS is less than a year old, and if recent history is anything to go by, more games are going to be making their way to it soon.
It’s already snagged all of Ubisoft’s upcoming games, not to mention hosting Borderlands 3 for a limited time, and a number of other big games from 2019.
