According to the head of Epic Games, it’s still worth it to them, and they can throw some money at Fortnite’s more successful content creators…

Epic has been fighting Apple and Google for years over their closed ecosystems and 30% profit margins. Fortnite is not yet available on iOS in the US, but the Epic Games Store is available worldwide on Android and in the European Union on iOS (12% profit margin on purchases, but 0% on developer processes). The mobile launch has led to Sweeney being interviewed by several publications. He spoke to IGN at length on a number of topics. Epic has spent $1 billion on the Epic Games Store so far, and it’s not over yet.

“I think after a couple more decades of this, we might run into some serious financial problems, but we’re determined to fight this out. I expect a lot of that battle to continue for the rest of this decade, and we’re fully committed to fighting through it and investing to break through. If you look at Epic’s history, we’ve always had big ambitions and we’ve always grown carefully. Our first big 3D game in the Doom and Quake era was the first Unreal game in 1998. And it sold two million copies. It was pretty cool! And we did Gears of War and expanded to consoles and that sold six million copies. And we decided to become an online game developer, and it took years to figure out how to do that, with years of no growth. But we finally figured it out with Fortnite in 2017, and now we’re a company with billions of dollars in revenue a year and thousands of employees and an opportunity like we’ve never had before.

Some people call it the metaverse, and some people call it just games, but it is real, and you can find hundreds of millions of players who are highly engaged in immersive 3D games with their friends. And we think that if we are successful with this, then someday there will be billions of users of this kind of game. And we think we’re in a great position to be a leading company or maybe the leading company in that world if the shackles are removed that prevent us and all developers from really competing on our own and becoming best-in-class companies in the industry. You’re either a company that has a direct relationship with customers and the freedom to do business directly with them, or you’re behind Apple’s and Google’s paywall and you don’t have that opportunity and you can’t grow and most of the profit that your company produces goes to Apple and Google who use it for f*ck all… stock buybacks and dividends instead of investing in hiring and innovating and building technology and making the world a better place,” Sweeney said.

By comparison, he was less eloquent when talking about legal costs and the world he envisioned if the two big tech companies could actually be defeated: “In legal fees, it cost us a billion dollars of revenue, maybe several billion… But I felt very strongly that the right way to challenge them was to show the world the real impact of their policies, because Apple… Apple does a good job of hiding it. They don’t let developers tell users that they’re paying 30% of their fee for nothing, or that their purchase price is going to Apple for nothing, and it’s not widely known. We look at the goals of our company in terms of decades. We’ve been in business for 33 years, which is a long time for a technology company, especially a game company. There were a lot of game developers in 1991, not many of them are around now.

But we think that our best days are ahead of us, and we think that our best days can only be achieved when we have true freedom, and we think that the best way to get that freedom is to go all out and fight for access, rather than fighting over money, which is what Apple is trying to encourage all other developers to do. Do you want your children to grow up in a market where Apple and Google take all the profits from all the digital businesses and control access to all the information? It’s not a good world. So no regrets, even though it’s been terribly expensive. We’re really looking at our future opportunity and future value, rather than the opportunity we missed by fighting Apple and Google in this way,” Sweeney added.

Epic also released its 2024 annual review of Fortnite’s creator ecosystem. The number of creators tripled over the course of the year (2023: 24,000, 2024: 70,000). The number of islands created is 198,000, and an average of 60,000 creator islands are played on each day. 70% of players enjoy both Epic-created and Creator-created content. Epic paid out a total of $352 million to creators last year. Nearly 30,000 received $100-$999, approximately 5,400 received $1,000-$9,999, 1,728 received $10,000-$100,000, 418 received $100,000-$300,000, and 154 received between $300,000 and $1 million from Epic.

37 received between $1 million and $3 million, 14 received between $3 million and $10 million, and seven received more than $10 million in 2024. Epic is now paying out approximately $330 million per year to community creators. Players have spent 5.23 billion hours playing games made by creators, which is 36.5% of total Fortnite play time and growing. Epic notes that these numbers are increasingly boosted by non-combat creations like social role-playing, party games, deathruns, and horror.

Source: PCGamer,  IGN, Epic Games