If you are referring to their game sales, its not working out as well as you think. Epic is getting a lot of flak from developers for practically giving away their games just to keep people on the platform. Add in that some of the games being added are very old games, games created with ai, game that are half finished, and games that are not exclusive and you got a lot of problems for one platform. As for them making games, they hardly do that as much as they use to. As for leasing the unreal engine, that only goes so far as technically you can get the platform for free. Its when you go for distribution that you have the leasing agreement but even that can vary based on the prestige of the developer utilizing the engine. There are a lot of games using the unreal engine but not all of them are making big enough bank to be a serious financial boost for epic. What is providing their biggest profit appears to be fortnight which they have milked till its shooting out powder instead of liquid.
If you've followed the history of their online store at all, you know the real reason they launched that which like their lawsuits with Apple and Google, is a lot more inside-baseball than the retail sales you're looking at.
As for "Developer Flack", that's news to me since the ones who have their games "given away" are agreeing to and getting paid for that arrangement.
Anyway, since they're not a publicly traded company, they get to do these sorts of long-term things intended to reshape industries rather than focus on quarterly profits.
But as to what I was talking about, I'm referring to Unreal, the thing you
didn't mention in the previous post.
It's their oldest product and why Epic Games exists at all.
As for the business model, I'm aware of how it works which leads me to believe you don't understand how they're making money off it. that huge group of people not making real money with anything they make from using it aren't their actual customers.
That's just how they ensure it maintains its status as an industry standard.
It's the multi-person studios who blow right past that $1 million in sales (which isn't very high for anyone who isn't a hobbyist or indie developer) who are their real customer base.
Customers like Ubisoft, Gameloft, CD Projekt Red, even EA who has been moving to Unreal 5 in favor of their previously developed in-house engine - these are the kinds of companies paying royalties on each unit sold that make Unreal profitable.
The adoption of Unreal in the movie, tv, and animation industries has also begun to show huge upside and they've entered that market with a very similar approach giving access away for free while making money on enterprise solutions for big studios that need it... like Disney.
For that matter, guess what "gaming engine" was used
in the production of the highest grossing movie of 2023?
You're right that Fortnite makes more today but Fortnite is also their showcase for Unreal Engine development and for years now, has been on a path to become a platform of its own
(now complete with it's own version of Unreal 5 accessible from within it to develop with) rather than a game like it started out being and if Fortnite does not continue its evolution away from being just about the game it originally broke out as*, you can bet Unreal will still be around and still continuing to grow as a business.
If Disney just wanted a gaming studio, they'd have had the funds to outright buy Ubisoft rather than take a minority stake in Epic. Heck, Epic themselves has the capacity to outright buy a studio like Ubisoft and gobble up that IP with barely a blink if they were so motivated.
Maybe some day they will.
In this scenario, Disney's not in this for the IP. That's what
they are bringing to the table
(along with that $1.5 billion, of course).
My point is, this investment from Disney is about
so much more than a gaming studio and as a tech company, which is
really what Epic is today; a tech company that owns a few gaming studios - they have business interests that align with almost everything Disney does outside of timeshares.
If you don't want to see that and want to be stuck in the mindset that Epic is just about Fortnite and that Fortnite is still just a battle royale game, I'm obviously not going to change your mind, though.
*Though for something launched in 2017 that saw it's highest recorded unique user activity ever last fall, they seem to be managing to get by for the moment - not sure what milk you think has turned to powder, there.
