It's been five years now since the PC version of Borderlands 3 launched as a high-profile timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store. At the time, Gearbox's Randy Pitchford memorably mused that Steam "may look like a dying store" in "five or ten years" thanks to increased competition from Epic and others.
Fast-forward to this week's announcement of Borderlands 4, and despite Pitchford's old comments, the sequel will not follow its predecessor's example of EGS exclusivity. The new game plans to launch on Steam and EGS simultaneously sometime in 2025 (alongside PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions).
When one social media user noticed that change this week, Pitchford responded with another lengthy message explaining why his early hopes for the Epic Games Store's rise to dominance were "misplaced or overly optimistic."
In the short team, Pitchford said his high hopes for Epic's effort were initially "validated" by the launches of Borderlands 3 and 2022 spin-off Tiny Tina's Wonderlands (which was available on EGS for three months before its Steam release). "Borderlands 3 and Wonderlands demonstrated clearly that the customers show up for the games, not the storefront," he said.
But Pitchford now says Epic didn't "successfully press its advantage" to take a significant chunk of Steam's dominant market power. "Famously, Steam does very little to earn the massive cut they take and continues its effective monopoly in the West while would-be competitors with much more developer friendly models continue to shoot themselves in the foot," Pitchford said.
"The industry gives Steam their monopoly because publishers are afraid to take the risk to support more developer and publisher friendly stores," he continued. "It’s all very interesting and there is a huge amount of opportunity in the PC gaming space for retail disruption, but no one seems to be able to make it happen."
A limited success or an Epic failure?
Internal documents revealed in the Epic vs. Apple case in 2021 show that both Gearbox and Epic seemed to benefit from the Borderlands 3 exclusivity deal. Epic set a guaranteed sales floor of $80 million to help attract Borderlands 3 to the platform—if the game sold less on EGS, Epic would pay Gearbox the difference to reach that amount. But Gearbox's game managed to hit that sales floor in just two weeks, bringing in more revenue on its own than the entirety of EGS had for the previous nine months while also attracting plenty of new EGS users.