Epic Games caused quite a bit of backlash when it was announced earlier this year that Metro Exodus would be available at launch as an Epic Games Store exclusive, despite having previously been available as a pre-order through Steam. Now, some of the leaders at Epic have opened up more about the backlash, and why they don’t plan on doing anything like it in the future.

The news comes by way of an Epic Store Q&A panel at GDC 2019, wherein some of the company heads were asked how much anger the move caused and whether or not they’d consider shooting for exclusivity again at the cost of ripping a title away from Steam. “We don’t want to do that ever again,” responded Steve Allison. “We had been talking to those guys for a number of months,” he said, “and they made some decisions on their end—this is not a throw under the bus thing, it’s just the timing of where that came together and what was important to their business—we decided to do it together, we both knew there was the potential for the thing that happened in terms of communication. I think it felt way worse and was bigger than we thought, and in real-time, we spent time talking … ‘we will never do this again in this way.'”

And I think we’re not in a situation now where that could ever happen, because now we’re live and we have a view out in time, and we can work with everybody … We have a case study where it says ‘maybe we should make our decisions earlier,’ and we will.”

Metro Exodus reportedly still sold well despite being pulled from Steam, though Allison has confirmed that he doesn’t want what happened to 4A to happen to other developers in the future. In regards to whether or not Epic plans on shooting for more exclusives in the future, Allison left it fairly open-ended. “We could go to zero, or we could go to very very few major exclusives within a given year,” he said. “We will definitely not be doing them on the scale we’re doing them now.”

Metro Exodus is now available on PC through the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

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