More and more documents are coming out of the Apple vs Epic lawsuit that got started on Monday. The latest shows just how much Epic paid Take-Two Interactive to make Borderlands 3 exclusive on the Epic Games Store.
GamesDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless uploaded this image showing how much Epic paid Take-Two for its exclusive arrangement. The total payout was $115 million, including an $80 million minimum sales guarantee, $15 million on marketing, and $20 million on “non-recoupable fees.” Epic also packaged up the other Borderlands games for The Handsome Collection and also sold the Civilization series for an extra $31 million.
And then we see on the right side how much Epic made back. Epic recouped its minimum sales guarantee of $80 million within the first two weeks of sales. It also gained 1.56 million Borderlands users, 53% of which were totally new to the Epic Games Store. Taking into account Epic’s 12% cut, Epic made $9.2 million on $100 million in Borderlands 3 sales.
Another chart from Axios Gaming’s Stephen Totilo shows that Borderlands 3 was the biggest revenue maker for the Epic Games Store in all of 2019, and was in fact the biggest revenue generator for the entire Epic Games Store up to that point.
Borderlands 3 was the exception to Epic’s exclusive agreements. In the same chart, we see that Metro Exodus’s launch generated just $2 million for the Epic Games Store, while Division 2’s exclusive launch made even less. If Epic is paying out $80 million for minimum guarantees, it seems extremely unlikely that either exclusive arrangement was profitable for Epic.
According to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney’s testimony on Monday, the Epic Games Store is still “hundreds of millions of dollars short of being profitable,” and won’t see net positive revenues until 2024 at the earliest. Contributing to these losses are exclusive releases but also Epic’s habit of giving away free games every month.
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Actually a collective of 6 hamsters piloting a human-shaped robot, Sean hails from Toronto, Canada. Passionate about gaming from a young age, those hamsters would probably have taken over the world by now if they didn’t vastly prefer playing and writing about video games instead.
The hamsters are so far into their long-con that they’ve managed to acquire a bachelor’s degree from the University of Waterloo and used that to convince the fine editors at TheGamer that they can write “gud werds,” when in reality they just have a very sophisticated spellchecker program installed in the robot’s central processing unit.
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