DARQ developer explains why he turned down an Epic exclusivity deal

Wlad Marhulets, the one-man team and developer of the horror game DARQ at Unfold Games, who recently released the game on Steam, explained on Reddit and Medium his reasons for turning down an Epic exclusivity deal.

Marhulets, three days after releasing his game on Steam, received an email from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney proposing him to enter his title into an exclusivity agreement. On his post on Medium, the dev said Epic “made it clear that releasing DARQ non-exclusively is not an option.” He ended up rejecting the offer before getting into speaking about money; he had many reasons for not accepting the deal.

In bold letters, Marhulets wrote: “I had just announced DARQ release date on Steam – pulling the game off Steam a few days after Steam release date announcement would forever ruin the credibility of my studio.”

Many Steam users already had the game on their wish-list; it was on the Top 50 most-wanted games. A removal of the game would have made many fans disappointed. For him, it was important to put his Steam customers first, and shared a brief history of Amazon as an example of trust. “Consider Amazon’s history — the company remained unprofitable for many years by ALWAYS putting their customers first.”

Also, he mentioned he was glad to work with digital store GOG in order to give gamers the choice of where to purchase his game. He added: “I wish the Epic Store would allow indie games to be sold there non-exclusively, as they do with larger, still unreleased games (Cyberpunk 2077), so players can enjoy what they want: a choice.”

It was only one day after he rejected the offer from Epic that Ooblets’ developers announced an Epic exclusivity deal and made made fans feel disappointed. Those developers also received violent and racist threats. Their game was supposed to be released on Steam originally.

Marhulets also noticed a retweet from Sweeney congratulating GOG for scoring a deal for Cyberpunk 2077 and mentioned support for a “multi-store future” for PC games. The DARQ developer noticed a reply in which a user asks Sweeney why he wanted DARQ to be an Epic-exclusive title if he is into that “multi-store future.”

If that's true why did you want @UnfoldGames to be an epic exclusive but then refused when he offered the game to be both on Steam and EGS?

— Xmeagol (@zfxmeagol) August 17, 2019

Towards the end of his long post, Marhulets shared screenshots of the email he received and of the one he replied to Sweeney. Sweeney wanted a one-year exclusivity in exchange for “some sort of minimum guarantee based on sales projections for year one.”

“I wish there wasn’t a double standard and indie developers were given an equal opportunity to sell their games across multiple store fronts, so the players can enjoy what they seem to want the most: a choice,” says Marhulets.

[Sources]: @info_68117 (Unfold Games @ Medium): Why I turned down exclusivity deal from the Epic Store (developer of “DARQ”). @UnfoldGames (Reddit): AMA – I’m the developer of DARQ, and I just released it after working on it (my first game) for over 3.5 years. The creation of the game has an interesting story behind it, I’m here to answer your questions.