Epic Games Earned $3 Billion Revenue In 2018, Thanks To Fortnite

Karamchand Rameshwar - Dec 28, 2018

Epic Games managed to earn around $3 billion in revenue in this year and most of that was probably thanks to the massively popular Fortnite.

It is not really a secret that Epic Game, the creator of the massively popular game Fortnite, has had an incredible run in 2018. But how successfully was Epic Games last year? According to TechCrunch’s report, the revenue that Epic managed to grab this year was around $3 billion (approx Rs 21,010.5 crores).

Data on the TechCrunch report was mostly from an anonymous source with extensive knowledge of the business as the Fortnite creator doesn’t disclose its financial data publicly. The incredible run for Epic Games was even better when it released an iOS version of Fortnite. While it is not clear how much profit out of the massive $3 billion the iOS version of Fortnite generated, Sensor Tower revealed data that suggested iOS users’ spending a few months ago was more than $1 million (Rs. 7 crores) each day.

TechCrunch speculated based on the November estimate of Sensor Tower that Fortnite in iOS generated $385 million (Rs. 2,696.3 crores) between April and November and that was a monthly revenue of around $48 million (Rs. 336.1 crores). The revenue figure of the Android version was a bit harder to estimate because Epic Games distributed on their own, skipping Google’s Play Store. Some people estimated that it generated about $50 million in revenue in 2018.

In summer, many analysts predicted that the hugely successful Fortnite would bring around $2 billion (approx. Rs. 14,005 crores) this year and Fortnite now proved that those analysts were too conservative when predicting those estimates.

However, Fortnite isn’t the first successful game title of Epic Games. According to TechCrunch, the Gear of Wars made by Epic Games brought the company around $100 million in revenue with a development budget of $12 million. However, it is not really fair comparing Fortnite with Gear of Wars because it’s much easier to buy and play a game compared to 2006, the year Gear of War was released. Moreover, Fortnite is also available on most of the popular platforms, including PC, iOS, Android, Mac, Xbox, and PlayStation.