Obsidian Entertainment was adding Steam achievements to The Outer Worlds hours prior to making the move to Epic

Obsidian Entertainment’s highly anticipated RPG The Outer Worlds is the latest to join the squad of games that made the jump from Steam to Epic Store. Like Metro Exodus and The Division 2 before it, The Outer Worlds was marketed to come to Steam sometime this year. So naturally, it came as a surprise when it was announced that Obsidian’s space RPG would be a 1 year exclusive to Epic Store and the Windows store. As one would expect, the backlash from the community has been unreal and have taken to express their displeasure in the official Twitter page for the game.

Now, what’s interesting about this whole debacle is whether Obsidian personnel was aware of the switch or not, as it’s usually a publisher decision (in this case being Private Division, a subsidiary of Take Two Interactive). At a Game Informer interview last month, The Outer Worlds leads Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarski did confirm that Outer Worlds will be coming to Steam. Aside from that, it has also been noticed that the Steam database for The Outer Worlds was been worked on, just 4 hours before the announcement. As you can see here, the developers were busy adding achievements to the Steam version from March 8 to yesterday, just hours before the big reveal and changing the release date from 2019 to 2020.

Update: Achievements are still being added, probably finishing off what they started and have it ready early.

We also reported last February that a release date of August 6 was added to the game’s Steam DB before being removed shortly after. With The Outer Worlds coming to Steam only next year and the fact that Epic Store doesn’t support achievements, there is not really a reason for the devs to add achievements the Steam DB this early. However, this could mean that the devs (the non-higher-ups at least) were unaware of the move to Epic Store, which was the same case with Metro Exodus developers 4A Games. Maybe this is why the studio has not made any remarks regarding this business deal since. But as with anything not backed by solid evidence on the internet, take these with a grain of salt for the moment.