Earlier today, the official Borderlands 3 Twitter account put up some now deleted tweets. Normally this wouldn't be a "thing" to care about, but these particular tweets included some previously unknown information about the release of Borderlands 3.
Among the information revealed is the potential release date for the game. The date looks to be September 13, 2019. In addition, it seems as though pre-orders for the game will get access to the Gold Weapon Skins Pack, a similar pre-order bonus to the one offered with the release of Borderlands 2. It also seems as though Borderlands 3 will continue to use Shift Codes and Golden Keys to unlock in-game content.
One of the now deleted tweets included a short video showing off the pre-order bonuses. Included in the video were three logos. The logos were for Gearbox, publisher 2K, and the Epic Games Store logo. Yes, that's right, Borderlands 3 is coming to the Epic Games Store. Part of the trailer was captured and re-uploaded by Warior64 on Twitter.
Obviously you can see the logos in the bottom left of the the video.
Will it be exclusive? It's not yet clear if that will indeed be the case. We will apparently have to wait until April 3 to get the concrete details on all of this. April 3 seems to have been the date when these tweets were actually supposed to go live.
2K is owned by Take-Two Interactive. Just last month, Take-Two's CEO Strauss Zelnick said that it's best "to be where the consumer is, rather than indicating to the consumer where they need to be." He goes on to say, specifically about the Epic Store that they "want to be where the consumer is." He continues to say that they "see competition on the retail side to be a good thing. It just means more distribution."
It sounds like Zelnick really isn't a fan of locking a game to a single distribution platform, but it still remains to be seen if 2K, Gearbox, and Epic's large stacks of cash say otherwise.
Update (April 1, 2019 at 5:54PM):
It looks as though Borderlands 3 will be a timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store. Gearbox's Randy Pitchford just took to Twitter to try to calm the waters in the wake of the earlier leak but ahead of the official announcement on Wednesday.
From what Pitchford says, Borderlands 3 will be a timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store for a period of six months. He says that he is personally fine with exclusives "when they come (with) advantages." What those advantages are on a storefront that lacks even a shopping cart is really anybody's guess right now.
IE: Good luck with the EGS if you're in China (EGS doesn't exist there), or play games on Linux (no Linux EGS client). Or live in countries where they now have to pay far more than usual because Epic doesn't eat the cost of various transaction fees like other digital retailers do. Or in places where they have to pay those additional fees and still don't have regional pricing. Or live on Earth where Epic doesn't allow devs to make keys in order to sell on third-party sites at prices that tend to be cheaper than the primary storefront.
I was trying to use his comment against him, to say "i like to shop in different stores, like Steam for example".
Lots of people say the Epic store will get better, and it will probably make more progress than all the other Steam "competitors" which... haven't changed in the slightest since their launches... but considering that truth i'm not betting money on it, especially as their amazing groundbreaking marketing strategy is just to confuse and annoy the PC market.
We've been the smallest gaming market for a long time, i'm not sure of our current status but i'm assuming despite massive growth we're still the smallest, introducing 3rd party exclusivity within a platform that has grown mostly due to the strengths of its community, and the popularity of Steam creating a viable space for AAA, indie, personal projects, crowdfunded ventures and everything in between is INSANE to me.
Epic claim to be making the PC market a better place, but while nobody is going to say the better revenue split is a bad thing, i think gifting lump sums to studios for exclusivity sets a really ugly precedent.
Various indie studios have admitted the Epic payment is enough to make the studio profitable even without selling a copy of their game, so that payment must be bloody impressive, god knows what they're giving for Borderlands 3, then Microsoft gives Steam Halo out of no where and Bethesda does the same with all of its properties, i sincerely hope those weren't the result of exclusivity payments from Valve, we haven't heard about anything like that but the timing is dark.
The PC platform grew and proved it was a market worth investing in, developers and publishers were willingly delivering their titles, now we're in a moral grey area where chunky envelopes are being pushed into peoples palms, and in return we get statements bestowing the virtues of a totally featureless store.
According to all accounts, Microsoft is the reason for Halo showing up on Steam. They were never approached by Valve, but rather they're the ones that did the approaching. So, I don't really believe there is any reason to assume that Halo is coming to Steam due to any sort of moneyhatting from Valve. As for Bethesda, I just kind of get the feeling their brief experiment with only launching on their own store didn't really go the way they thought it would.
I also hope that Epic starts seeing reduced income from Fortnite, forcing them to compete in a manner which actually benefits the platform and its customers.