Metro Exodus
developer Deep Silver announced that the upcoming first-person shooter will be available for pre-load, which allows people who pre-ordered the game to download it ahead of its official release date, on Steam but not on the Epic Games Store. But Metro Exodus isn't even available on Steam anymore.
The game's publishers announced in January that Metro Exodus would be moving from Steam to the Epic Games Store. (Deep Silver owner THQ Nordic said that decision was made by Koch Media, which owns the game's intellectual property, without any warning.) Steam pre-orders would still be honored, though.
Now it seems those lucky few who managed to pre-order Metro Exodus before it was pulled from Steam will have something to gloat about to their Epic Games Store counterparts. Being able to pre-load the game might not mean much to most people, but it allows eager players to experience the game that much sooner.
The Epic Games Store doesn't yet offer pre-loading for any titles; apparently that feature didn't make the shortlist of things for Epic Games to prepare ahead of the store's debut in December 2018. It's a young platform, and as this shows, it will have shortcomings.
Competition is healthy. No matter what the Monopoly board game teaches, allowing one group to have too much control over an entire market is often a bad thing, especially if that control is used to stifle competition. In theory, offering a competitor to Steam could be good for PC gamers in the long term. But in this instance, some gamers may be upset that they can't pre-load a very large game prior to its launch.
