Escape from Tarkov Steam Release?

With the huge peak of interest in Escape from Tarkov recently, many people are asking if we will see an Escape from Tarkov Steam release.

So, is Escape from Tarkov on Steam? No.

Will Escape from Tarkov be on Steam soon? No.

Will Escape from Tarkov ever be released on Steam? Maybe.

Nikita Buyanov, the COO of the game developer responsible for EFT, Battlestate Games, has spoken about this briefly in a presentation on releasing a hardcore title. At the White Nights conference in 2018, Nikita stated the following,

Many developers start working on a project and they wait for reasonable and well supported feedback [on Steam], but it’s not this way. So, for us, it was a good idea to start from our own platform. And, of course, we didn’t want to pay Steam lots of money… It’s just about the initial starting process of the game, we didn’t want these negative overviews to influence people’s opinion.
Listen to the full presentation, “Self-Publishing a Hardcore Title” on Youtube.

Basically, as the development team was starting out, they could not afford to put Escape from Tarkov on Steam for both financial and reputation reasons. At the end of 2018, Steam announced a new revenue split for game developers selling on their platform. For developers with under $10 million in revenue there is a 70%/30% split between the developer and Steam respectively. From there, developers with revenue between $10 million and $50 million the split adjusts to 75%/25% and developers with revenue over $50 million it adjusts again to 80%/20%.

So, for a game that charges $44.99 for the EFT beta, that would be about $13.50 for each sale going to Steam. For an independent developer with no investment parties, that would be a significant hinderance for development. This, along with the negative reviews that betas typically receive on Steam, could be detrimental to Escape from Tarkov. Many users expect titles on Steam to be finished and polished. Therefore, when they are playing a beta with some bugs or certain aspects not fully functioning, they will voice their negative opinion.

Take the example above. DayZ started out as an Alpha on Steam and it received many poor reviews right away. So much that over its time on Steam it has received 64% positive reviews with 36% negative. Compared to just the last month of the fully released version of DayZ on Steam, it has received 75% positive and only 25% negative reviews.

All of these aspects play into why Escape from Tarkov is not on Steam. Even though, Nikita did say that it was just about their starting position. This means that EFT may get a release on Steam once it is full released. Keep in mind, Battlestate Games has not announced a release date for Escape from Tarkov.

This means it could be a while before we see EFT on Steam and that is a good thing. We do not want Battlestate to feel any pressure with Tarkov, we want them to take their time, take all our money and put it back into the development of the game. So far, that seems to be exactly what they are doing.