Another week, another exclusive title snapped up the Epic Games Store.

This time around it's the latest entry in IO Interactive's Hitman franchise, which will only be on PC on the Fortnite firm's platform for an unspecified period of time when it comes out in January 2021. Furthermore, 2016's Hitman is free to download between August 27th and September 3rd on the platform.

IO Interactive CEO Abrak says that partnering with Epic has helped reduce the risk of self-publishing Hitman 3.

"Self-publishing Hitman 3 is a big step for IO Interactive in achieving our highly ambitious goals as an independent studio,” said Hakan Abrak (pictured), the CEO of IO Interactive.

“Furthermore, this partnership with Epic has given us the freedom to create the game exactly as we imagined, for our fans and for our community uncompromised. For our long-term fans that have supported us on the World of Assassination journey, we’re happy to have mastery and location carryover from their existing progress into Hitman 3 on Epic Games Store.”

Back in 2017, IO Interactive was spun out of Japanese parent company Square Enix, becoming independent and taking charge of the Hitman IP. The firm partnered with Warner Bros for 2018's Hitman 2, but has opted to self-publish the third entry in the series. Hitman 3 was announced at the PlayStation 5 reveal event in June 2020.

This is just the latest title that Epic has snapped up exclusively since it launched its PC storefront in December 2018. In the past, the company paid $10.5m for exclusivity of Remedy and 505 Games' Control.

As of the start of 2020, the store had attracted 108m users on PC.