Oddworld InhabitantsOddworld: Soulstorm creator Lorne Lanning has confirmed that his upcoming sequel will be exclusive to Epic Games Store, the Fortnite publisher’s answer to rival digital storefront Steam.
Over the past year or so, any developer that has pledged exclusivity to Epic has been met a fair amount of anger from gamers. In some cases, the anger and upset has been understandable… but it’s rarely been let out in a healthy fashion, with a number of indie developers receiving some truly vile hate for making their games exclusive to the Epic Games Store.
Oddworld InhabitantsPerhaps in anticipation of a similar backlash, Lanning posted a lengthy statement on Twitter explaining the reasoning behind his decision. Financial assistance seems to be the major reason behind the move, which is something Epic has been able to offer a lot of smaller games in order to get them away from Steam.
He wrote:
What I would like to do is provide you with the reasoning that went into bringing the PC version of Soulstorm to the Epic Games store as an exclusive because you deserve to know. We’ve been financing Soulstorm 100% ourselves. Soulstorm is our most ambitious game ever and we are committed to creating a great game that meets the highest level of quality. But to create the version of Soulstorm we want, and you deserve, we needed additional financial assistance.
Lanning continued, saying that as an indie publisher it’s important that Oddworld Inhabitants evaluates partnerships ” that will help us achieve our goals while protecting our vision for Soulstorm and the quintology.”
“Epic supports our goal and commitment and is willing to help us achieve them by providing us with an advance on our PC sales, and we are incredibly grateful”, he finished.
Oddworld Inhabitants Oddworld: Soulstorm was first announced by Oddworld Inhabitants back in 2017, and is being billed as a direct sequel to 2014’s New N’ Tasty, which was a remake of the first game in the series, though it’s not a straight up remake of the original sequel, Abe’s Exoddus.
Soulstorm currently has a release window of early 2020, and is really more of a retelling of the second game, with tons of new ideas but a selection of familiar faces, locations, and story beats.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.