Get Ready For A Lot More Epic Games Store Exclusives

When the Epic Games Store launched in 2018, it had a rather controversial strategy when it came to pulling market share away from Steam: exclusive games. Outside of console exclusive games, PC gamers were somewhat insulated from platform wars, but that all changed with Epic's willingness to pay big bucks for timed exclusive games. A little more than two years later, Epic is still shelling out for exclusive games, and if you thought the company was going to slow down with these contracts, then we've unfortunately got some bad news for you.

Instead of slowing down on the exclusives, Epic Games has indicated that it will actually pick up the pace. Speaking to PCGamer, an Epic Games representative said, "We have more exclusives coming in the next two years than we have published to date." Of course, the representative didn't clue us into just how many games that is, but PCGamer notes that there have been over 100 exclusive games released on the Epic Games Store in the past two years.

So, expect more than 100 PC games to be exclusive to the Epic Games Store over the next two years. Some of those will inevitably come to Steam at a later date, but others may be exclusive to the Epic Games Store forever. Keep in mind that Epic has a games publishing arm these days, and it makes sense to assume that PC games published under that business will be permanent Epic Store exclusives.

This, obviously, has been a sore point among the Steam-using PC gaming community, but it's clear that Epic thinks merely competing with Steam on a feature-to-feature basis won't be enough to pull gamers over to its own store. The exclusives approach seems to be working well for it too, with PCGamer reporting that the Epic Games Store is up to 56 million monthly active users as of December 2020.

Of course, that's not just the work of Epic's exclusivity deals, but also the fact that Epic has been giving away free games every week since the store launched (something it shows no signs of ending in the near future). We'll see what games Epic manages to land as Epic Store exclusives over the next two years, but clearly those who were hoping for an end to PC exclusivity deals are going to be waiting a lot longer.