Epic Games Store exclusive titles are expanding continuously and while it has considerable benefits for publishers, gamers never agree with such a thing that limits their variety of choices. The ongoing argue become more serious when Gearbox announced their upcoming Borderlands 3 will appear on only on Epic Games Store for six months, and the consequences for such a decision was heavy, as the community started to review-bomb previous games of the series on Steam to show how angry they are with the exclusivity contract between Epic Games and 2K. However, the action not only didn’t make the publisher to change mind over the exclusivity, but also brought more support for the policy from the development team.
Ignoring what players meant to say with the review-bombing, CEO of Gearbox Randy Pitchford criticized dated review system on Steam and supported 2K’s vision for its publishing policy. Pitchford said:
Ironically, that this misuse is possible and that Steam has no interest in correcting this misuse makes me kind of happy about 2k’s decision and makes me want to reconsider Gearbox Publishing’s current posture on the platform.
There is no doubt that review system on Steam has some unsolved issues, as we’ve seen numerous times that games getting review-bombed with some reasons that are not directly connected to the game itself, but Pitchford surely knows what made fans to do this and they are definitely expecting more detailed reasons for the policy, instead of criticizing the review-system and making excuse out of that. The argue even got worse when Pitchford called fans’ “Victim blaming bullshit” in response to a user that had said “if there wasn’t an exclusivity deal these actions would never have happened.”
Borderlands 3 will be released on Sep 13th for PS4, Xbox One and PC, but before that, we will get to see first gameplay trailer of the game on May 1.
Share your ideas with us through comments and don’t forget to follow Gaming Instincts on Twitter.
Grand Theft Auto 6 will launch in fall 2025.
A Nintendo Switch trailer was also released.
According to SteamDB.