Tim Sweeney, who leads Epic Games, tends to fork out a lot of money in exchange for Epic Games Store exclusivity and he has done so with Remedy Entertainment’s recently released Control as well.

The money wasn’t directly transferred to the Finnish dev team, but to the publisher of Control, namely 505 Games, who is owned by Digital Bros. Now, their financial report of the first quarter of the fiscal year (ending June 30) revealed a figure that was shared by Daniel Ahmad, a senior analyst at Niko Partners, on Twitter.

„Digital Bros, [the] parent company of 505 Games, has disclosed that they received a payment of 9.49 million euro from Epic Games for Control. Which I would imagine is for exclusivity. 55% of that payment going to 505 Games,” Ahmad wrote. 9.49 million euros is a lot of cash. That is nearly ten and a half million dollars, and mind you, it was an ADVANCE payment! We need to explain this: Epic Games pays ahead of the game’s launch for the devs or publishers to make their upcoming games exclusive to the Epic Games Store, and they’ll pay more money after Epic has managed to make that money back from sales.

Previously, we have heard that Control’s budget was around 20 to 30 million euros, so the Finnish team has practically recovered at least a quarter of their costs with just this exclusivity deal. Still, it is interesting to see how much Epic Games is willing to pay for such deals, and with bigger games (such as Metro Exodus), the figures that they could pay say, Deep Silver (the publisher of Metro Exodus), might be even higher.

So this story shows why publishers or devs could jump ship even weeks before their game is out (as did Bigben recently with WRC 8): money.
You can read our review of Control here.

Source: WCCFTech