New Epic Games store exclusives include Remedy’s Control

Epic used its ‘State of Unreal’ GDC keynote to announce that a number of new and older games are headed to its Epic Games store, including upcoming exclusives such as Remedy’s Control.

Set for release this summer, Control is a supernatural third-person action-adventure game from the studio behind Quantum Break and Alan Wake. It’ll be available on PC exclusively via Epic’s digital store, while it’ll also be released on PS4 and Xbox One.

Epic has also partnered with new Take-Two publishing label Private Division. The move will see The Outer Worlds, an upcoming single-player first-person sci-fi RPG from Obsidian, have a simultaneous PC release on both the Epic Games and Windows 10 stores.

It will also see Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey from Panache Digital Games, a studio led by the creator of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, Patrice Désilets, released on PC exclusively through the Epic Games store. Both titles will still be released on consoles, and will hit other PC digital distribution platforms after a year.

Meanwhile, Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human, Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls will be coming to PC for the first time “soon”, when they’re made available exclusively via the Epic Games store. To date, the titles have only been released on PlayStation platforms, due to an exclusive working relationship between Quantic Dream and Sony, which ended in January 2019 after more than a decade.

Epic has also claimed that the Epic Games store’s user base had grown to over 85 million PC players since launching as a rival to Steam in December 2018.

It offers developers an 88 per cent share of the revenue their games bring in, compared to the 70/30 per cent revenue split offered by Valve.

The more attractive revenue split has helped Epic secure some major exclusives in the past few months. Epic said at GDC this week that one of those, Metro: Exodus, sold over 2.5 times as many copies in its first few weeks on the Epic Games store than the previous series entry, Metro: Last Light, sold on Steam over the same period of time.

The more recently released The Division 2, a co-exclusive available from Ubisoft‘s UPlay service and the Epic Games store, is arguably the most high-profile game yet to exclude Steam as a distribution platform. And at GDC this week, Ubisoft and Epic announced an extension to their agreement that will bring “several major PC releases” to the Epic Games store in partnership with Uplay, with further details to follow at a later date.

The Epic Games store also offers users a free game every two weeks, and the Fortnite-maker said at GDC that Ubisoft back catalogue titles will join its free game programme at a later date. Night School Studio’s supernatural thriller Oxenfree, which normally costs £14.99, is currently free to download as part of the scheme.

Other games confirmed as coming exclusively to the Epic Games store include Afterparty from Night School Studios, The Cycle from Yager, Dauntless from Phoenix Labs, Industries of Titan from Brace Yourself Games, Journey to the Savage Planet from Typhoon Studios and 505 Games, Kine from Chump Squad, Phoenix Point from Snapshot Games, The Sinking City from Frogwares and Bigben, Spellbreak from Proletariat Inc, and Solar Ash from Heart Machine and Annapurna Interactive.