It’s Not An Epic Loss, It’s A Crisitunity!

Though Why Apple Cares Is A Mystery

The Epic Games store is having a rough go in their attempt to stem the flow of Valve’s income, even after spending $444 million on their storefront this year.  The costs come from a variety of sources other than the design and upkeep of the infrastructure it relies on.  The giveaways that have been a constant feature are certainly a part of the cost of running the Epic Games store, some have been AAA games and you can safely assume the publishers received some compensation from Epic because of this.

The other major expense is also related to many people’s biggest problem with the Epic Store, those one year exclusive launches.  When the Epic Games Store launched it announced that there would be a variety of games which would be exclusively available for PC on their storefront for a year, after which they would be available from other sources.  These included titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Mechwarrior 5, just to name a few.

In order to convince publishers to agree to these exclusive releases, Epic set a minimum guaranteed number of sales, and paid that amount up front.  The example given in the Slashdot summary was Control from Remedy Entertainment, which saw Epic paying $10 million up front to guarantee they were the sole source for PC gamers for a full year.  For some bizarre reason Apple is commenting on this, suggesting that Epic could lose up to $600 million this year; not that any of their users are Epic Game Store customers.

Tim Sweeney suggests that this is not an Epic loss but instead an investment into the future of Epic.   It has been a bit over two years since the Epic Game Store launched and people started to voice their opinions about the storefront, and it will be interesting to see how this news is received by customers.