Despite enjoying an extremely positive debut and having the marketing muscle of not one but two major publishers in its corner, the powers that be have apparently decided that The Outer Worlds must make moar money. At their GDC keynote today, Epic Games announced that The Outer Worlds will be launching on the Epic Games Store, which offers an an advantageous revenue share. It won't come out on Steam until a year afterwards. The game is not quite an Epic-exclusive however, since it's also launching on Microsoft's own Microsoft Store platform, and on consoles of course. There's no fancy trailer or press release for this announcement, just this tweet:


As you can see from the replies, many people are upset about this. Patrice Desilets' Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, another Private Division title, was also announced as an Epic-exclusive at the keynote, so it appears to be a publisher decision. If you're an Epic-hater at least you've got the Microsoft Store option, although that means dealing with UWP or whatever it's called.