The argument over game store exclusivity is back in the spotlight, sparked by fresh comments from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney and a pointed rebuttal from a key voice at Larian Studios.
Sweeney recently framed the rivalry between Steam and the Epic Games Store as a clear win for everyone involved. His view is that sometimes Epic gets the sale, more often Steam does, but the real takeaway is consistent: more competition means more choice, better pricing, and stronger outcomes for both gamers and developers.
Larian Studios’ publishing director Michael Douse didn’t buy that “pro-developer” conclusion—at least not as a blanket statement. He acknowledged an important detail: Epic fully funded Alan Wake 2, which helped ensure the game could be developed and released. But he argued that the real-world results show why exclusivity can be difficult to defend when a major platform is removed from the equation.
Douse pointed to Remedy Entertainment’s reported financial pressure after launch as an example of the downside. In his view, skipping Steam likely reduced the game’s reach and sales potential, especially for a premium single-player release that relies heavily on visibility, discovery features, and the buying habits of a large PC audience. He suggested that even if Epic had received a cut from Steam sales, Remedy may still have recovered its costs faster—and potentially moved into profit sooner—because the overall sales volume could have been higher.
While Douse agreed that competition between storefronts is healthy in principle, he argued that exclusivity deals are much harder to justify when there are clear cases where a game appears to underperform specifically because it isn’t available where a significant portion of paying customers are shopping.
He also questioned the longer-term direction of Epic’s store strategy. The implication is that Epic’s best path to scale may involve turning Fortnite’s enormous player base into buyers of full-priced, story-driven games. Douse suggested that, so far, there hasn’t been strong evidence that this audience is being successfully converted at scale. He likened the challenge to what happened in mobile app stores, where years of free-to-play dominance trained users to expect low-cost or free experiences—making it far harder to sell premium games without affecting their perceived value elsewhere.
For Alan Wake 2 specifically, the publishing arrangement reportedly meant the project was funded and shipped, but it still took close to two years for Remedy to reach profitability. The game also skipped a Steam release and didn’t arrive on Nintendo Switch, and critics of exclusivity argue that launching on Steam alone could have meaningfully increased unit sales, improved long-tail performance, and reduced the financial strain on the developer.
At the center of the debate is a question that keeps resurfacing in the PC gaming industry: does exclusivity truly help developers long-term, or does it mainly shift risk in a way that can still leave studios struggling if a game doesn’t reach the widest possible audience? As more high-profile releases test different launch strategies, the conversation around Steam versus Epic Games Store exclusives is unlikely to cool down anytime soon.
