Borderlands 3 is one of the biggest exclusive offers in the Epic Games Store.
Borderlands 3The release version on the PC has been locked to Epic Games Store It is one of the earliest examples in the past six months, demonstrating how much Epic attaches importance to building its PC platform.
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Of course, the terms of the agreement have not been shared publicly, but due to the ongoing trial between Epic Games and Apple, we have a better understanding of how much Epic will cost the transaction and the game’s performance on the platform.
According to confidential documents disclosed by the court, the “Borderlands 3” transaction cost Epic US$115 million. As a minimum guarantee (advance payment), the amount is subdivided into 80 million US dollars, which is the fee Epic paid to 2K Games, regardless of whether the game can earn this number on its own. This leaves $15 million (recorded as a marketing commitment) and an unrecoverable cost of $20, which is actually a cost of locking the game on EGS.
But this is not all that Epic Games has paid. The exclusive rights to Borderlands 3 are part of a larger deal with 2K Games, which also allows Epic to offer free games Borderlands: Handsome Collection and Civilization 6 on the Epic Store. The handsome collection is worth 11 million U.S. dollars, while “Civilization” cost 20 million U.S. dollars.
The total amount of “fully armed 3 transactions” referred to in the document is $146 million.
The same document also indicated that this was ultimately a carefully calculated move by Epic because of the success of the game. By October 2019 (two weeks after the game’s release), Borderlands 3 had earned US$100 million in revenue on PC, with direct sales on the Epic Games Store broken down to US$77 million, and distributed on PC The revenue of the commercial and retail sector is 23 million U.S. dollars.
This means that Epic’s $80 million bet is a good choice, because the game’s revenue is more than the revenue two weeks before the release. During the same period, EGS cut Epic’s net income by 12% to $9.2 million. According to this agreement, 1.56 million EGS users have used Borderlands, of which 53% are new users of the platform.
Although the details of this particular case are new, providing developers with guarantees to persuade them to lock their games on the Epic Games Store within a set period of time has become a core part of Epic’s user base strategy. To date, Epic has spent more than $444 million, which is the company’s CEO (acceptable to CEO Tim Sweeny) seeking to expand the influence of the store.
As part of Monday’s proceedings, Sweeney also stated that he does not want the Epic Games Store to be profitable in another three or four years.
