Epic Games has posted its earnings for this year, and to nobody’s surprise they’re absolutely enormous. The Epic Games 2018 earnings total over $3 billion, and that is mainly because of the company investing in its highly popular battle royale game Fortnite, according to an insider that knew about the studio’s finances.
Fortnite, despite being a free-to-play games, runs on a microtransaction model that allows players to buy things like skins, emotes, dances, and more, which is likely the reason behind why Fortnite is so financially successful, especially given the game’s popularity.
Despite originally coming out as a multiplayer survival game with zombies, Fortnite’s battle royale mode brought the game from a forgettable survival title to a battle royale hit, causing the Epic Games 2018 earnings to be so high. The game quickly eclipsed PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, the previously unchallenged battle royale master of the gaming world, and has since continued to stand above it as PUBG struggled to fix numerous issues and retain a flagging playerbase.
The game’s success has been helped along by a partnership between Epic Games and Tencent, a major Chinese media company that also is responsible for helping PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds get to China and Asia in general. Tim Sweeney, CEO for Epic Games, has said that Tencent’s knowledge of how to broaden Epic’s horizons and change its approach has been a big help to the company in general.
Fortnite has continued to grow with each passing day, helped along by the fact that it’s now been ported to every major platform in gaming right now, including Xbox One, Playstation 4, PC, and Nintendo Switch. Its total players number around 125 million, and will likely only continue to increase as long as Epic can avoid making the same sorts of mistakes that Bluehole and PUBG Corps did.
If they manage to do that (despite the various claims of copyright infringement from people that have done dances that appear in the game), the Epic Games 2018 earnings might only be the beginning with how much money the company will rake in.
