About a year ago from right now, The Game Awards had a controversy going on, as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was nominated for Game of the Year despite it not being fully released yet. Fast forward to now, and PUBG has fallen off the cliff so to speak, and it’s “little brother” in Fortnite has not only stepped up to the plate, it’s not the ball out of the gosh dang ballpark. Seriously, the game went from “copy” or “clone” to top dog over the course of a few months. And Epic Games is rolling in it.
No, seriously, they’re literally rolling in dough, because according to TechCrunch, Fortnite has earned developer Epic Games $3 billion dollars in 2018. Let me repeat that for you: $3 BILLION DOLLARS!
Now, to be fair, this has not been confirmed by Epic Games. However, we know that they’ve crossed $2 billion in profits based on earlier reports, so them finishing the year with a $3 billion dollar profit wouldn’t be that strange.
Of course, the question now becomes, “Wait, how did they earn that much money?” Well, the game has had quite a year. There was the Avengers Infinity War crossover that brought Thanos into the game for a special mode featuring the Infinity Gauntlet. Fortnite was put onto the Nintendo Switch (and had 2 million downloads in a single day at launch) as well as on the Android phone line. These two additions have helped the game get to an astounding 200 million user base (in terms of how many players have actually registered for the game).
And while the game itself doesn’t cost anything to play, people spend money on items and cosmetics to help them be the best Fortnite player around. Add in that constantly happening over a stretch of time? Yeah, you get $3 billion dollars.
The only question now is, how much are they going to make in 2019?
