Epic Games had an outstanding 2018, there’s no doubt about that. Fortnite continued to break records on a regular basis, the Unreal Engine is still the most popular engine in the industry (at least among triple-and-double-A developers) and more recently the company even opened their own Game Store, trying to create a bona fide competitor to Valve’s Steam on PC (though they have expressed the wish to expand on other platforms like mobile, too).
According to sources cited in a report published yesterday by Tech Crunch, Epic Games also raked in a lot of cash with $3 billion in profit accrued throughout 2018. A huge slice of this profit clearly came from Fortnite, though it’s not easy to piece it together across all platforms. Sensor Tower recently estimated $385 million in revenue on iOS alone, but the game is also out on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and Android. On the latter platform, for instance, Epic avoided using Google’s Play Store altogether and opted instead for their own launcher.
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Regardless of this rumor on yearly profit, two months ago The Wall Street Journal reported that the company is now valued at almost $15 billion after a few big investors like KKR, ICONIQ Capital, aXiomatic, Vulcan Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and Lightspeed Venture Partners acquired $1.25 billion in shares as part of the latest investment round. It’s worth reminding that Tencent acquired roughly 40% of the company’s stakes in 2012 and other minority shareholders include Endeavor and Disney, though CEO and Founder Tim Sweeney still maintains control of the company.
The future seems to be exceedingly bright for Epic Games, even after the game development studio chose to abandon franchises that were once synonymous with them, like Gears of War (sold to Microsoft and now handled by The Coalition) and Unreal Tournament (the development of the new project based on the IP was confirmed to be on halt earlier this month).
That’s not to say there aren’t any other game projects on the pipeline beyond Fortnite. We do know that the ChAIR subsidiary studio, known mainly for Shadow Complex and the Infinity Blade series, is still at work on the SPYJINX project in collaboration with Bad Robot. We may hear more about that next year.
There’s also the question of how Epic Games will employ the Cloudgine technology acquired alongside the studio in early 2018. Cloud-powered gaming is an increasingly hot topic in the games industry and it’s fair to assume Epic doesn’t want to be caught unprepared for the next revolution.
