Borderlands 3 Steam release date confirmed for March

Gearbox has announced a Borderlands 3 Steam release date of March 13 and confirmed the new version will support cross-platform play.

The 2K-published shooter first released on September 13, 2019 through the Epic Games store as part of a six month exclusivity deal.

The Epic Games store launched as a rival to Steam in December 2018, offering developers an 88 per cent share of the revenue their games bring in, compared to the 70/30 per cent revenue split offered by Valve.

The more attractive revenue split helped Epic secure some major PC exclusive during 2019, including Metro: Exodus, Remedy’s Control, Obsidian’s The Outer Worlds and more.

According to Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, the exclusivity deal turned out to be very successful for the developer, with Borderlands 3 attracting more concurrent players at launch than any other PC game in it history.

Pitchford claimed “launch day peak concurrent players of Borderlands 3 is about *twice-as-high* as the all time peak concurrent players of Borderlands 2”.

He said on Twitter the day after the game launched: “Incredible day with new peak concurrency (and climbing). Best numbers in Gearbox history!”

Deep Silver’s parent company recently claimed that its former Epic exclusive Metro Exodus was performing “great” on Steam following its return to the platform.

Metro Exodus made its long-awaited Steam debut this month, launching with an introductory 40% discount, which has now ended.

Embracer Group CEO Lars Wingefors also said of the game’s Steam performance: “I was happy to see it’s been performing well, selling about 200,000 copies already, and surprising to see that one big country in Asia was the biggest country buying the product, very close to America.”