A new court filing in the Epic VS Apple case has revealed some interesting details about the working of EGS. As per the document, Epic Games made $454 million in losses on EGS in 2019 and 2020.
Since its launch on Dec’18, the Epic Games Store has never earned a single dollar for Epic. In the year 2019 Epic lost $181 million, while in the year 2020 Epic reported $273 million in losses. Within the same period, their “Golden Goose” — Fortnite also dropped from $2.4 Billion in revenue in 2018 to just $1 Billion in revenue in 2020.
The launch of the EGS was controversial, as many gamers didn’t like Epic’s business tactic of buying exclusive launch rights to some games. EGS offered loads of Free Games like GTA-V, Sid Meier’s Civilization 6, Borderlands: The Handsome Collection, and many more every week to lure in more users. All these tactics helped Epic garner over 160 million registered users and 56 million monthly active users.
Although the past 2 years have been tough on the balance sheet, Epic is optimistic that the store will turn profitable by 2023. The filing also states that the 12% distribution fee charged by Epic is sufficient to cover the operating cost. While the store is barebones and lacks many features, a 12% might only be sustainable if Epic plans to keep EGS as a barebone store only.
It will be interesting to see how Epic plans to turn the store profitable by 2023 and whether they plan to sign more exclusive deals and add some crucial features like a shopping cart, etc to the Store.
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