Author: Trafficblast

Another one of this year’s biggest releases is skipping Steam in favor of the Epic Games Store. Publisher Deep Silver has announced that the PC version of its upcoming first-person shooter, Metro Exodus, will be available exclusively through Epic’s digital storefront when it launches next month on February 15.

Prior to this announcement, PC players were able to pre-order Metro Exodus through Steam. These pre-orders will still be honored, but the game will be delisted from Valve’s storefront today, January 28, due to the new exclusivity agreement, which Valve blasts as “unfair to Steam customers.” In a statement on the Metro Exodus Steam page, the company wrote:

“Later today, sales of Metro Exodus will be discontinued on Steam due to a publisher decision to make the game exclusive to another PC store. The developer and publisher have assured us that all prior sales of the game on Steam will be fulfilled on Steam, and Steam owners will be able to access the game and any future updates or DLC through Steam. We think the decision to remove the game is unfair to Steam customers, especially after a long pre-sale period. We apologize to Steam customers that were expecting it to be available for sale through the February 15th release date, but we were only recently informed of the decision and given limited time to let everyone know.”

One of the major factors that has enticed developers away from Steam and to the Epic Games Store is its revenue terms; unlike Steam, the storefront gives companies 88% of their revenue while Epic only takes 12%, and it appears that split had a bearing on the decision to bring Metro Exodus exclusively to the platform.

“Epic’s generous revenue terms are a game changer that will allow publishers to invest more into content creation, or pass on savings to the players,” Deep Silver CEO Klemens Kundratitz said. “By teaming up with Epic we will be able to invest more into the future of Metro and our ongoing partnership with series developer 4A Games, to the benefit of our Metro fans.”

As another consequence of Epic’s more developer-friendly revenue terms, Deep Silver is selling the PC version of Metro Exodus in the US for $50–$10 cheaper than the usual $60 price tag most new releases carry. However, the game will still cost €60 in most European countries.

Metro Exodus isn’t the only major PC release that will be bypassing Steam entirely. Earlier this month, Ubisoft announced that its upcoming shooter, The Division 2, will also skip Steam in favor of the Epic Games Store and its own storefront.

Nintendo Switch owners may soon be able to enjoy one of Ubisoft’s biggest franchises on their portable systems. According to retailer listings, a new collection of Assassin’s Creed titles is coming to Switch in just a couple of weeks.

Czech store Herni-Svet has listed a Switch game titled Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation Collection, with a release date of February 15. This follows an earlier product listing from German retailer Media Markt for an Assassin’s Creed collection on Switch.

In response to these latest listings, Ubisoft told GameSpot it does not comment on rumors or speculation, though the publisher’s CEO, Yves Guillemot, told GameSpot last year that no mainline Assassin’s Creed game would launch in 2019. Perhaps this new collection is a way for the company to plug that gap while it works on a brand-new game for next year.

Ubisoft has not yet announced any plans to bring its hit series to Nintendo’s portable console, except for last year’s Odyssey, which came to Switch as a Japan-exclusive cloud-streaming game. Other than that, the last Assassin’s Creed game to launch on a Nintendo console was Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag on Wii U. Assassin’s Creed III, the title apparently part of this new Switch port, also came to Wii U. The other apparent Switch title, Liberation, initially launched as a PlayStation Vita exclusive in 2012, before later coming to PS3, Xbox 360, PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

The maker of a popular Dark Souls mod has opened his own studio. Peter “Durante” Thoman, who created the “DSfix” mod for the PC version of Dark Souls, has founded his own company with two colleagues, specializing in PC ports and providing consulting services.

PC Games N reports that his company is named PH3, after all three founding members holding PhD degrees. The company just finished all the paperwork in its home company of Austria, leaving him free to make the announcement. He plans to tap his expertise and experience as a computer scientist for the new work.

Thoman said he doesn’t plan to license games, which he calls “a whole other can of worms” with its own kind of technical expertise. Instead, he says fans will still have to request ports they may like to see from publishers directly. “But if you gain traction, you can certainly suggest they consider our services,” he said.

Dark Souls was a notoriously buggy PC port, to the point that even director Yui Tanimura called it “half-assed.” DSfix was widely adopted by the community as a must-have add-on to make it run properly. Later Souls ports were less slipshod, as he promised. Similarly, Demon’s Souls creator Hidetaka Miyazaki recently said he was open to another studio handling a remaster of the original genre-defining classic, but expressed disinterest in handling it himself.