The Outer Worlds won’t be released on Steam until a year after release
Obsidian’s dystopian space RPG The Outer Worlds will not initially be released on Steam after all. The PC version of the game will be available at launch on the Epic Game Store and on the Microsoft Store. A year after its release, other game stores will follow.
The Outer Worlds already had a Steam page and last month that page temporarily stated that the game would be released on August 6. Now it says that the game won’t be available until 2020. However, the game has not been delayed, but its release on Steam has. The Steam logo was shown with the announcement trailer from December last year.
On Twitter announces The Outer Worlds account that the game will first be released on the Epic Game Store and that other digital platforms will follow a year later. However, the game will also be available in the Microsoft Store with the first release. The latter is not surprising, because Microsoft has been the owner of Obsidian Entertainment since last year.
The wording of the Tweet seems to indicate that developer Obsidian has not chosen to make the switch to the Epic Game Store. Maybe that’s a decision of the publisher Private Division. That publisher reports that another game, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, will also be released first on the Epic Game Store.
After Metro Exodus, The Outer Worlds is the second major game to initially hit Steam right away, but then sign an exclusivity deal with the Epic Game Store. Epic makes such deals to boost the popularity of its own game store. The company persuades publishers with terms more attractive than those on Steam. Publishers pay a lower percentage of the sales amount of games to the platform.
The Outer Worlds is an RPG made by the studio that also developed Fallout: New Vegas and employs people who also worked on the first Fallout games. However, Obsidian does not own the Fallout rights itself.