After launching as an Epic Store exclusive, World of Goo 2 dribbles onto Steam this spring: ‘We’re grateful to Epic for funding development of the game’

World of Goo 2, sequel to the beloved 2008 physics-puzzler about building towers and bridges out of wibbly wobbly slime balls, will slop onto Steam this spring following almost a year of exclusivity on the Epic Games Store.

“ATTENTION Steam fans! We’ve been quietly readying World of Goo 2 for new platforms”, wrote developers 2DBoy and the Tomorrow Corporation on the latter’s website. “World of Goo 2 is coming to Steam in Spring 2025… so this year… and SOON!”

The Steam version will apparently come with “fabulous new achievements” as well as “other updates” the developers plan to reveal at a later date. The announcement specifies “many” of these updates will be coming to all versions of the game, though that implies some will be exclusive to the Steam version.

World of Goo 2 originally launched on the Epic Game Store last August. The sequel’s creation was funded by Epic, and 2D Boy and Tomorrow Corp dutifully tip their hats to the company for its support. “We’re grateful to Epic for funding development of the game—World of Goo 2 would not exist without this arrangement—and our exclusivity period has now ended, which means the game can now come to more platforms.”

Given when World of Goo 2 came out, and when it plans to hit Steam, it strikes me as a slightly odd length for an exclusivity deal. You’d normally expect them to last at least a year, so maybe Epic has released the developers from it early, possibly because it hasn’t sold as well as they expected. Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeney recently discussed the topic of the company’s exclusivity deals, and it seems like the strategy hasn’t helped the Epic store all that much.

“We spent a lot of money on exclusives,” he said in an earnings call last year, adding “a few of them worked extremely well. A lot of them were not good investments.” This isn’t the case for Epic’s free game programme, however, with Sweeney saying the company’s initiative of giving away free games every week has gone “swimmingly” because “developers who give away free games actually see an upsurge in the sale of their paid games on the store”.

I played World of Goo 2 when it released, and found it a typically sharp and witty puzzler, albeit one that perhaps suffered from the concept of in-game physics being less shiny and new than it was sixteen years ago. PCG’s own reviewer Kerry Brunskill was less troubled by such quibbles, however. ” I was generally having too much fun to really mind the odd stumble,” she wrote back in August. “It’s a clever, surprising game that celebrates all the goo that came before and all the goo here now.”