Epic Games Has Potentially Lost Over $300 Million by Trying to Compete With Steam

The Epic Games Store has only been around for a couple of years at this point, but Epic Games has been pouring money into the marketplace every since it first debuted. Much of this money has been dedicated to bringing exclusive titles to the platform, offering up free games on a weekly basis, and giving back a larger portion of funds from sales to the developers and publishers of said games. Although the store has been quite popular with some PC fans, it hasn’t come at the cost of Epic losing out on quite a bit of money to continue these practices.

Epic Games is said to have spent roughly $444 million on the Epic Games Store in 2020 on nothing more than exclusivity deals with various publishers. By comparison, the Epic Games Store as a whole only brought in $700 million throughout 2020, of which only $265 million of that was spent on the exclusives in question. As a whole, this means that the company hasn’t even made back the money that it spent to make the titles exclusive in the first place. When bringing into account 2019’s exclusives as well, Epic is said to have lost “at least $330 million.”

While this might seem like a high enough number to warrant Epic making some big changes in the near future, that seems to be far from the case. Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeney recently took to Twitter and said that the Epic Games Store has been a “fantastic success” on the whole. Sweeney touted that the storefront has already brought in over 160 million customers as a whole. It has also given away roughly $2,400 in free games since the store’s inception across 103 different titles.

Sweeney went on to also say that he views all of this money spent as an “investment” in order to make the Epic Games Store a pillar in the PC space well into the future. Obviously, Epic has enough money to throw around in this manner (thanks, Fortnite) that it surely won’t be hurting by losing a couple hundred million dollars in the moment. But if this pattern continues well into the future, it will be interesting to see if the corporation makes any changes with how it has been going about things.

[H/T GamesIndustry.biz]