It seems that the Epic Games Control exclusivity deal may have made the developers and publishers a lot of money before they even sold it. A report from 505 Games parent company Digital Bros has detailed its financials and it includes one particularly interesting number: $10.4 million (€9.49 million) from Epic Games.
Niko Partners senior analyst Daniel Ahmad highlighted a report from 505 Games parent company Digital Bros on Twitter. The report in question has all sorts of interesting information about the kind of money the company brought in, but it also happens to reveal that the Epic Games Control deal netted them a cool $10 million and some change according to Mr. Ahmad’s analysis.
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“Digital Bros, parent company of 505 Games, has disclosed that they received a payment of 9.49 million euro from Epic Games for Control,” he said on twitter, “Which I would imagine is for exclusivity. 55% of that payment going to 505 Games.”
Several questions were raised by this massive number, including the notion that this may have been for pre-orders. Pre-orders for Control began at the end of March 2019 and the $10+ million payment was marked as received by June 30, 2019.
“Yep. The payment from Epic was 100% for Control and was for the exclusivity deal,” Mr. Ahmad continued. “There was no payment from Sony or Microsoft. Unclear if there were any other strings attached to the payment, other than exclusivity [of course].”
The report also contains heaps of other interesting financial data, like the fact that Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night raked in $15.3 million (€13.89 million) before it had even been out for a year.
Presuming the report (and Mr. Ahmad’s analysis of it) are correct, Epic Games seemed willing to pay a serious amount of money just to get their hands on one big upcoming game for a limited time. One has to wonder what other deals they have in the works and how much they’d be willing to pay for some of the other hotly-anticipated games that are in development.
