Epic has revealed that Epic Games Store is still unprofitable.
The company made this revelation in the latest hearing of their antitrust case against Google. The Verge reported that head of the Epic Games Store, Steve Allison, was the person who shared this in court.
While this is seemingly negative news on Epic’s part, we should be mindful that the company made this statement in a court case where they are attempting to prove that Google’s business practices have had a harmful effect to Epic’s own business.
While we are certain Epic is not lying in court, we don’t have a bigger picture that can be provided if Epic shared their game store division’s financial information. For example, we don’t know how much revenue the store makes for Epic, and we subsequently don’t know how close their revenue and profit numbers are.
Epic has revealed previously that they pay a fixed dollar amount for each game that they give away on their platform. This means they don’t pay for every unit of a game that a user claims in their giveaways. So they aren’t paying astronomical numbers for these giveaways, which runs most weeks on a weekly basis, and accelerates to daily giveaways on special holiday periods.
Epic also has a warchest of cash based on revenues they collect from Fortnite Battle Royale. Of course, that Fortnite revenue potentially gave Epic carte blanche for their future ventures. For this reason, the company is pursuing this game store business, and they’ve also decided to take Google to court.
Now, there are other interesting revelations coming out of this case. Epic also revealed that Google offered them $ 208 million in incentives to convince them to keep complying with Google’s own app store rules. In fact, it turns out that Google has a program called Project Hug, making similar deals to other companies like Activision and Nintendo, so that they would not try to form their own app stores.
Epic hopes to use this case to coerce Google to open up Android so that they would officially offer third party app stores, from companies like Epic, Microsoft, and others. This obviously aligns with Microsoft’s plans for their Activision deal, although there’s no indication that they are a part of this antitrust suit directly.
While the Epic Google case isn’t getting as much publicity as the Apple vs Epic case or the Microsoft Activision regulation, it seems certain we will get even more interesting revelations about the industry in the coming weeks from it.
