Take-Two Interactive announced today that Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey, the promising prehistoric survival game being developed by Patrice Désilets' Panache Digital Games studio, will be available exclusively through the Epic Games Store for a year. Ancestors is being published by Take-Two's Private Division label, as is The Outer Worlds, also a timed Epic exclusive (not counting the Microsoft Store).
Interestingly, while Take-Two has favored the Epic Store with recent releases—Borderlands 3 will also be exclusive—the studio said in an earnings call today that these timed exclusives will be "rare."
"In terms of supporting the Epic Games Store, we think more distribution is a good thing," Take-Two chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick said during today's earnings call. "And while it's rare that we'll do exclusives for any period of time—we continue to support Steam with our titles, our catalog—and these titles will be going to Steam relatively quickly after their initial availability on the Epic Games Store."
The Borderlands 3 exclusivity period is different from Ancestors and The Outer Worlds. Borderlands 3 will come to "additional PC digital storefronts"—not necessarily Steam, but that's the assumption—in April 2020, in the neighborhood of seven months after its September 13 release on Epic.
Despite the Epic Store exclusivity, Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey remains listed on Steam, and looks like it will stay there. The Steam page says it "will be available on Steam one year after launch on other exclusive digital PC platforms."
