Creative Assembly has revealed that A Total War Saga: TROY will be releasing as an Epic Games Store exclusive for 12 months, and will be available for free if it is claimed within the first 24 hours.
A Total War Saga: TROY will focus on the Bronze-age and Homer's Iliad and allows players to go through the Trojan War. Of course, players expected to do so through Steam, not the Epic Games store, and a big reason is illustrated in the statement below:
We’re really excited about TROY, and we’re even more excited that this will give more of you the chance to play and enjoy it than might have had it otherwise. While we know that some of you won’t like the Epic Games Store exclusivity, we feel like this is a great opportunity for us in a lot of ways, and we’re hoping that you’ll take some time to hear us out and for us to answer what some of the questions we think you might have.
Perhaps most interesting is that there are no plans for future Total War titles to be Epic Games Store exclusives. Instead, this will be a one-time event that they want to use in order to "reach new audiences... as a business this means putting Total War onto new platforms so that it can reach more players." In the future, they want titles to be universally available on as many store fronts as possible. For Total War's 20th anniversary, being paid to allow players to have it for free for 24 hours to celebrate it's anniversary was what won over the executives.
This move also allows Creative Assembly to invest in "expansive back-end infrastructure development" that will allow them to expand to different stores. The studio also asks players to keep their criticism of this move to the studio as a whole instead of looking for individual employees to take out their anger on, which is pretty reasonable. We'll see if that happens, though.
What do you think of this move? Are you going to play the newest Total War for free? Let us know in the comments!
