Of the early Epic Games Store exclusives, only one got back what Tim Sweeney paid for it
Of the early Epic Games Store exclusives, only one got back what Tim Sweeney paid for it
And no, it’s not about Metro Exodus, or The Division 2, or Hades.
There has been a lot of talk about “exclusive” game releases in PC stores since the inception of the Epic Games Store . Fueled by money from Fortnite, Tim Sweeney’s and company digital store debuted with an aggressive acquisition strategy, constantly buying exclusives, with cases as controversial as that of Metro Exodus and its departure from Steam just weeks before its premiere. . Well, thanks to the trial between Epic and Apple we know if these “investments” have been profitable or not for the company. And we already anticipate that, as of June 2019, only 1 of the exclusive games gave benefits to Epic.
The fact is that Simon Carless, former editor of Gamasutra, has obtained a document where Epic details what they paid for each of their exclusives between December 2018 and June 2019 , as well as the sales generated by them. And while Epic covered the column where the names of the games appear for the trial, they have kept the column visible with the release dates of each one, which has allowed this Reddit user to guess which game is on this list. .
The result? Only one of the games recovered the money spent by it during its exclusivity period . It’s not about Metro Exodus, nor about big AAA games like The Division 2, which also debuted on Uplay but not on Steam. Neither was Hades, whose Early Access was first available on EGS. No, the only game that brought in more than what Epic paid for it was Satisfactory . Released in March 2019, Epic paid Coffee Stain Studios $ 11.5 million for the exclusivity of its game and it generated $ 11.6 million in revenue to the store, which we remember, only 12% of the sales.
Not surprisingly, Satisfactory sold half a million copies at EGS in just two months, so it can be said that its performance was… satisfactory for both parties. Beyond this game, the leaked document shows that Epic Games only hoped to recoup the investment with yet another game: Dauntless . In the end, the objective of Epic with its exclusives is not to generate immediate profits, but to attract users to its platform to grow and be able to compete in the future against Steam. Something that became clear when, during the trial against Apple, we learned the money paid for each free EGS game and the number of users obtained in return.
