The Epic Games Store has garnered significant controversy since its inception nearly three years ago due to founder and CEO Tim Sweeney’s insistence on securing exclusive titles for his digital distribution platform to quickly and aggressively gain market share over Steam and other rivals.
While it’s no surprise that Epic has dumped truck loads of cash to secure hot titles in the past such as 4A Games’ post-apocalyptic shooter, Metro Exodus, new documents have revealed that the company ended up earning zero profit from any of its initial wave of exclusive titles, sans for two—Satisfactory, an open-world factory building game from Goat Simulator developer Coffee Stain Studios, and Dauntless, Phoenix Labs’ free-to-play online action RPG.
These are the only titles that managed a negative shortfall (-0.6), which suggests that Epic Games made around $600,000 for each title. Dauntless is on the list a second time with a shortfall of 0.3, however, which indicates that it may have also been just another money loser for Epic.
| Title | Release Date | Minimum Guarantee | Expected Shortfall (millions) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Metro Exodus | 2/15/2019 | 37 | 22.2 |
| Anno 1800 / WWZ | 4/16/2019 | 35 | 14 |
| The Division 2 | 3/15/2019 | 35 | 24.5 |
| 6/15/2019 | 14 | 13.6 | |
| Satisfactory | 3/19/2019 | 11.5 | -0.6 |
| Hades/Ashen/Hello Neighbor | 12/6/2018 | 11 | 9.1 |
| Anno 1800 / WWZ | 4/16/2019 | 10.6 | 3.2 |
| Hades/Ashen/Hello Neighbor | 12/6/2018 | 10 | 8.8 |
| 2/19/2019 | 7.5 | 5.9 | |
| The Outer Wilds | 5/30/2019 | 7 | 5 |
| Sinking City | 6/27/2019 | 7 | 4.9 |
| Dauntless | 5/21/2019 | 5 | -0.6 |
| 6/24/2019 | 5 | 3.8 | |
| Genesis Alpha | 1/29/2019 | 4.6 | 4.3 |
| Shakedown Hawaii | 5/7/2019 | 4 | 3.9 |
| Magic The Gathering | 1/15/2019 | 3 | 2.7 |
| Hades/Ashen/Hello Neighbor | 12/6/2018 | 3 | 2.9 |
| Dauntless | 5/21/2019 | 2.5 | 0.3 |
| Close to the Sun | 5/2/2019 | 2 | 1.8 |
| Operencia | 3/29/2019 | 1 | 0.8 |
| Dangerous Driving | 4/9/2019 | 1 | 0.8 |
| Omen of Sorrow | 6/20/2019 | .3 | 0.3 |
| 3/19/2019 | .2 | 0 |
[…] clearly Epic was fine with losing money on EGS (timed) exclusive games to build up a userbase. (But the 2019 plan wanted ‘Wave 2’ – with another 100+ titles and a few hundred million dollars of advances – to recoup 65-75% of advances, vs. 35-45% recouped in the first wave. We don’t think it did that, even with tweaks including deals going to lifetime EGS recoup vs. first 12 months, and lifetime exclusivity on select titles.)
Source: Box (via r/fuckepic, The GameDiscoverCo)