Gamers spend $680M in Epic Games Store, showing there’s much more to Cary firm than Fortnite

CARY – In the past year, gamers spent a whopping $680 million in the Epic Games Store with $215 million of it going towards third-party PC games.

The firm also clocked 103 million store customers and 2.32 million followers on Instagram.

Yes, there’s much more to Epic than its megahit Fortnite and the global used Unreal development engine that’s finding growing acceptance for uses far beyond game design such as special effects and auto/vehicle engineering.

The game story’s impact is according to figures released by the privately held company this week on its blog.

Epic and its founder/CEO Tim Sweeney are in a fight for online game distribution, offering lower revenue sharing rates and taking on Google in a battle to reduce such dollar demands.

It’s also good news is worth sharing considering that it wasn’t the easiest year on record for the Cary-based firm, which faced mounting criticism from players and a slew of controversies — including a lawsuit against a former employee for leaking trade secrets on Fortnite Chapter 2.

Epic Games’ Fortnite nabs top-earning title – again – with $1.8B in revenue

However, the company seems to be taking it all in its stride.

“In 2020 we’ll continue to lead the way in open and developer-friendly store terms, with 88% revenue sharing, support for developer and publisher payment systems, and keyless purchasing integration with Humble (more PC stores coming soon),” Epic Games said on its website.

“On top of that, we’re offering integration with Epic’s platform-independent and store-independent online services with more than 300,000,000 customer accounts and 1,700,000,000 friend connections.”

The company also said many more cross-platform games are coming to the store.

“Epic is also helping developers support cross-platform play using the tools we built for Fortnite, with online play across PC, Mac, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, iOS, and Android. Dauntless from Phoenix Labs is the first third-party game with Epic-powered support for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch.”