PC games giant Valve has said that its intention was not to annoy people earlier this year when it described Metro Exodus becoming an Epic Games Store exclusive just weeks before it was set to launch on Steam "unfair".

That's according to Steam developer and designer Nathaniel Blue - as reported by Kotaku - who said that the phrasing wasn't meant to give any credence to the backlash against the title's publisher Deep Silver and Epic itself.

Blue also says that Valve has remained silent as other titles became Epic Game Store exclusives and that this is the plan moving forward.

“I don’t think that was our intent to upset people,” he said.

“It wasn’t the intent of the message. It was more about the timing. The game was about to launch, and then it was [exclusive to the Epic store]. So that was the only goal of that. What came out of that was not what we expected. It wasn’t meant to be this lightning rod.”

He continued: "I don’t know that we’d go back in time and change it necessarily, but I can say that in the future we didn’t say anything. In the future we didn’t continue to do that because our goal is not to upset the community or light anyone’s hair on fire. Our goal is to get developers close to customers, have a really valuable place for people to play games, and stay focused on that.”

Metro Exodus was the first of many games to go exclusive with Epic's storefront but was not the last to be the source of a backlash within the community. Last month, Ooblets developer Glumberland revealed the title would be exclusive to Epic Game Store, resulting in death threats and harassment from gamers. Epic has since condemned those harassing its development partners.