Ekaterina Bespyatova

Epic Games spent $11.6 million on the first distribution of games in the Epic Games Store

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Yesterday, the trial of Epic Games and Apple began, during which the companies shared a lot of legal documents. One of them contains data on how much Epic paid developers for the first months of free giveaways of their games in the Epic Games Store.

The table with the company’s expenses was published on Twitter by gaming expert Simon Carless. It lists the games that Epic gave away for free from December 2018 to September 2019.

In total, Epic paid developers about $11.6 million during this period.:

  • the most expensive collection was Batman: Arkham Collection, for which the company gave $ 1.5 million. The trilogy was taken away for free by 6.5 million people — more than any other game in the specified period. At the same time, almost 614 thousand people who downloaded the collection about Batman were new users of the store. Each of them cost Epic $2.44;
  • The second most expensive purchase was Subnautica — Epic paid $1.4 million for it. Although it was downloaded less frequently than Batman: Arkham (4.6 million times), the game brought more new users to EGS. There were 804 thousand of them. Moreover, these users cost a little cheaper for Epic — $ 1.74 per person;
  • but Inside and Celeste were the most expensive for Epic in terms of attracting new customers to the store. For these two projects, the company gave $ 800 thousand and $750 thousand, respectively. Titles interested 2.7 million people, of which only 71.9 thousand and 62.5 thousand users were new. As a result, each new user cost Epic $11.1 (Inside) and $12 (Celeste);
  • the most profitable deal was the purchase of Metro: 2033 Redux. The company did not pay for the distribution of the title (the network suggests that this is due to the temporary exclusivity of Metro: Exodus). The game was taken by 4.5 million people, of which 169.8 thousand were new EGS users;
  • Among other profitable purchases, indie projects were noted mainly: World of Goo ($0.32 per new user), RiME ($0.47), The Jackbox Party Pack ($0.64) and Fez ($0.7). Also, Ubisoft‘s For Honor, which brought 118.2 thousand people to EGS, got into these ranks. Epic paid $0.47 for each of them.

As Epic pointed out, as of September 2019, there were 20.7 million users in EGS. 18.5 million people participated in the giveaways, but only 1.32 million gamers (7%) bought the game in the store at least once after that. In total, over the nine months of EGS operation, such users spent about $ 53 million (33% of the total store revenue).

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