“Misguided” hopes: Why Borderlands 4 won’t be another Epic Games Store exclusive

It has now been five years since the PC version of Borderlands 3 was launched as a high-profile, limited-time exclusive on the Epic Games Store. At the time, Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford mused poignantly that Steam could look like “a dying store” in “five or ten years” due to increasing competition from Epic and others.

Fast forward to this week’s announcement of Borderlands 4, and despite Pitchford’s old comments, the sequel will not follow its predecessor’s example of EGS exclusivity. The new game is set to release simultaneously on Steam and EGS sometime in 2025 (along with PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions).

When a social media user noticed the change this week, Pitchford responded with another lengthy message explaining why his initial hopes for the Epic Games Store’s rise to market leadership were “misplaced or overly optimistic.”

In short, Pitchford’s high hopes for Epic’s efforts were initially dashed by the introduction of Borderlands 3 and 2022 spin-off Tiny Tina’s Wonderland (which was available on EGS for three months before being released on Steam).”Borderlands 3 And Wonderlanders has clearly shown that customers come for the games and not for the shops,” he said.

But Pitchford now says Epic has not successfully leveraged its advantage to take a significant chunk of Steam’s dominant market power. “Steam famously does very little to earn the massive share it takes, maintaining its effective monopoly in the West while potential competitors with much more developer-friendly models continue to shoot themselves in the foot,” Pitchford said.

“The industry is giving Steam its monopoly because publishers are afraid to take the risk of supporting more developer and publisher friendly stores,” he continued. “This is all very interesting and there is a huge opportunity for retail disruption in the PC gaming space, but no one seems to be able to execute on it.”

A limited success or an epic failure?

Internal documents revealed in the Epic vs. Apple case in 2021 show that both Gearbox and Epic have Borderlands 3 Exclusive agreement. Epic has set a guaranteed revenue of 80 million US dollars to Borderlands 3 to the platform – if the game sold less on EGS, Epic would pay Gearbox the difference to reach that amount. But Gearbox’s game managed to reach those sales numbers in just two weeks, bringing in more revenue on its own than EGS had in the previous nine months, and also attracting many new EGS users.

However, not all of Epic’s attempts to secure exclusive rights have been so successful. In 2019, Epic paid around $542 million in minimum guarantees for exclusive titles that were only expected to generate $336 million over their term. That $206 million difference means it’s throwing money at publishers in the hope that their exclusive games will help attract new users to EGS.

And these sustained efforts haven’t been a complete failure for Epic. By the end of 2023, the company said there were 75 million active monthly users for its PC store, up from 68 million the year before. But that’s still relatively low compared to Steam, which had 132 million active monthly users in 2021. Although Valve hasn’t released monthly user numbers since then, Steam’s peak concurrent user count has increased by about 67 percent (according to SteamDB tracking) since the end of 2021—from 21.17 million to 35.55 million. That suggests Steam’s current monthly user count could be well over 200 million.

Things look even worse for Epic when you compare the $950 million EGS players spent in 2023 to the estimated $8.8 billion Steam players spent that same year.

To be fair, it’s impressive to take a new PC store from scratch to about 10 percent of Steam’s huge revenue in about five years. But that result must still be disappointing for Epic, which predicted in 2019 that EGS could account for 35 to 50 percent of the total PC games market in 2024.

It is an open question whether Epic’s limited success is the result of the company’s failure to “play its advantage,” as Pitchford suggests, or is simply a sign that Steam’s massive, deep-rooted network effects have proven more resilient than expected. Regardless, Borderlands 4The Steam launch of – following the example of other former exclusive EGS publishers – does not mean that Pitchford has given up hope that a Steam killer could still be on the horizon.

“I sincerely hope Epic continues the fight and makes progress,” Pitchford said. “Epic needs to prioritize the store and try some new initiatives, while also doubling down on its efforts to gain key exclusives if it wants to have a chance. I also hope other serious competitors emerge. I’m sure we’ll all be watching.”