Epic Games have adopted a number of methods to drive users to the Epic Games Store, and then to keep users there, and regular giveaways of big and small games alike has been one of their primary means of doing that (alongside timed exclusives, of course). Now, documents submitted by Epic for the ongoing Epic v Apple case and now made public (via @simoncarless on Twitter) have revealed how much money the company paid to several developers for free giveaway periods of their games.
Some of these are pretty decent figures, such as $1.4 million paid for Subnautica (which netted them over 800,000 new accounts, amounting to $1.74 paid by Epic per each new account), $1 million for Mutant Year Zero (earning them over 197,000 new accounts, at $5.05 per account), and $1.5 million for the Batman: Arkham games (leading to nearly 614,000 new accounts at $2.44 per account).
Quite a few of these games, however, were worth shockingly low-value deals. For instance, Epic paid just $50,000 for Super Meat Boy ($0.52 per new account), $45,000 for RiME ($0.47 per account), $80 for Axiom Verge ($0.64 per account), and $75,000 for Fez ($0.70 per account). Even something like Alan Wake was worth just $150,000 ($2.37 per account), while the deal for For Honor was surprisingly low with Epic paying just $63,000 for it ($0.53 per account)- though it’s possible that the low value attached to For Honor in particular is due to a larger deal that Epic has in place with Ubisoft’s general output.
The Epic v Apple case and the documents made public for it have shed light on a lot of other details across the industry of late, from Sony’s cross-play policies to how Epic Games changed their mind on it to much more. Stay tuned as more info comes out.
Want to know how much $ the devs of those 'free' Epic Games Store games got, & how many copies were grabbed? Here's the first 9 months to September 2019. 👀 pic.twitter.com/5hkLb1VEjj
— Simon Carless (@simoncarless) May 3, 2021
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