Nuclear Throne developer Rami Ismail says that Valve was simply “out-businessed” over Metro Exodus’ move from Steam to the Epic Games store. In an interview with PCGamesN at Yorkshire Games Festival (which you can read in full here), the Vlambeer co-founder made fun of Valve’s statement, which said that the game’s move was “unfair” to consumers.
Ismail says that “the only thing I will argue in Valve’s favour is that it was a game that was up from pre-order that was pulled, and I think being transparent about that messaging is important. But Valve arguing anything being unfair, with the position they’re in, they just got out-businessed. I’m sorry, it sucks to be you.”
Ismail goes on to discuss the change in the context of Valve’s impact on indie development, saying “there’s an entire generation of indie game developers that got wiped out because of an algorithmic change in Valve’s recommendation algorithms and they said, ‘Well that’s just what the data said’. Well here’s what the data said, it said that Metro Exodus is not on Steam because the deal Epic gave [developer 4A Games] was better. To call that unfair, but call all they do just data, it couldn’t have been a funnier statement from that perspective.”
Valve is now going to have to come to terms with the fact that it’s not the only major platform holder on the market, but Ismail suggests that the company isn’t likely to flounder repeatedly as it does so – “they’ll make some misses, but not always.”
“You can tell that they’re a game developer at heart. They’re iterative and that’s sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. I hope they stay around because seeing them iterate through the problem of ‘Shit, we have a competitor now’ – hopefully it’ll be hilarious.”
Related: Here’s the Epic Games store roadmap
Metro Exodus is, of course, not the only major title that Valve has lost out to in recent months, thanks to Ubisoft’s decision to bring The Division 2’s PC release to the Epic Games store. Plenty of indie titles have already made their way to the new platform, and Epic suggest it’s not about to stop banking on exclusives any time soon.