Metro Exodus had perhaps the ugliest case of jumping ship from Steam to the Epic Games Store. After being available to pre-order on Steam for months, publisher Deep Silver pulled it off sale without warning. It turns out, that was because the game had been picked up by Epic to be an EGS exclusive. Valve wasn’t pleased, and neither were those who expected the game to release on Steam in 2019, causing a massive campaign of review-bombing of older Metro games. When it became clear that the situation could have been handled better, Deep Silver parent company said that the decision to go with Epic was entirely Koch Media’s. One year later, Metro Exodus arrived on Steam as promised, and with a generous launch discount. According to Embracer Group CEO Lars Wingefors, the launch has been a success. Embracer is the parent company for THQ Nordic, and Deep Silver.
“I was happy to see it performing well, selling about 200,000 copies already,” Wingefors said as part of the group’s Q3 earnings call. Wingefors was also surprised to see that “one big country in Asia” - likely referring to China - made up the game’s biggest audience on Steam. Although Embracer never revealed sales figures for the Epic Store, the company previously said that its revenue was higher than PS and Xbox stores, despite selling more copies on consoles overall compared to PC.
