In August 2019, Epic Games predicted losses from the first wave of exclusive games released in its store. Two years later, an internal document got online. It turned out that the company expected to lose about $130 million.Game expert Simon Carless drew attention to the document.
The information was published as part of a lawsuit between Epic Games and Apple.
According to the information provided, the company spent $217 million to attract developers to the Epic Games Store. This amount was distributed among 23 games as a minimum guaranteed payout for an exclusive release in the store.
According to the forecasts of Epic Games, only two titles from the list were supposed to recoup costs and eventually reach payback. The rest, according to the forecast, should not have been a plus. In total, the company was ready to lose more than half of the invested amount — $ 130 million.
Recently unsealed documents in Epic/Apple lawsuit add interesting August 2019 EGS data: $210 million MGs (minimum guarantees) for first wave of EGS exclusives, Epic expected to lose $130 million of that $, based on performance. pic.twitter.com/nH9gBubNfG
— Simon Carless (@simoncarless) August 3, 2021Which games were supposed to pay off, it is impossible to understand from the document itself.
All titles are blacked out, but not the release dates of the titles themselves. Thanks to this, the Reddit user linked these dates with the exclusives released in the Epic Games Store.
For example, it turned out that the minimum guaranteed payment for Metro Exodus was $37 million, and The company paid $35 million for The Division 2.
At the same time, Carless notes that the list published on Reddit may not be completely correct. The fact is that sometimes several titles came out at once in one day. So, the developers of Anno 1800 could receive both $10.6 million and $ 35 million.
An important component of the Epic Games Store business model is not only temporary exclusives, but also free giveaways of games. In May, it became known that the company earned $ 53 million from them during the first months of the store’s operation. At the same time, the platform still does not make a profit – its losses by the end of 2021 may reach $ 600 million.