[Update #2]: Metro Exodus is now removing the somewhat controversial Denuvo Anti-Tamper technology.

[Update]: Metro Exodus will be coming back to Steam on February 15th, one day after the exclusivity deal expires.

The Epic Games Store released a little while ago with two major positives to its name: noticeably higher revenue sharing for developers, and a free game every two weeks for the rest of us. That alone would be enough to make most people at least check it out, but then Epic decided to take things a step further by offering developers seemingly large sums of money in exchange for a year-long exclusivity period.

The latest in this list of exclusives, as you can probably guess from the title, is the soon-to-be-released Metro Exodus. All current pre-orders (both digital and physical) will still contain a Steam key as previously promised, and will still be able to grab all of the possible expansions and DLCs as normal. Any future purchases on PC, however, will need to be done on the Epic Games Store until the exclusivity deal expires on February 14th, 2020.

While I do approve of Steam having more competition, especially from someone as big as Epic, I have to admit that the way the Epic Games Store is doing things really rubs me the wrong way. Instead of creating an ecosystem where both developers and customers get more than they would elsewhere, Epic seems to be content with just throwing large stacks of money at developers and 'forcing' them off other platforms. Why not offer a spicy discount or create significantly better tools than what Steam offers instead? For goodness sake, the Epic Games Store doesn't even have a search option as of right now!

That mini-rant aside, I am genuinely curious to see what happens next. I can't imagine Steam is going to be happy with multiple games using it for free advertising, only to then pull away in the final stretch and stop selling on Steam entirely. Whatever the response may be, I can only hope it'll put a stop to the whole exclusivity nonsense so the competition can start being about which store has more to offer to the customer, rather than which one has more money to throw around.

Once more information becomes available I'll make sure to let you know, but until then you can read the full announcement over at Metro Exodus' Steam page.