Epic Games is in court trying to prove that Google is running an illegal monopoly with their Google Play store. As part of the trial, Epic Games Store boss Steve Allison has admitted that the Epic Games Store is still not profitable, according to reporting by The Verge.
If this sounds extremely familiar, it’s because Epic tried to get a similar ruling against Apple. It went pretty poorly for them at that time. I guess all those layoffs the company performed freed up enough budget to pay their lawyers for another go. If at first you don’t succeed.
Speaking of not succeeding, the Epic Games Store doesn’t seem to be. We knew it wasn’t turning a profit from emails revealed in 2021. Part of this is because the company has been doling out money to try and secure exclusivity for certain titles and giving out others for free to try and drive adoption of the platform. More specifically, the leaked emails showed that Epic paid $146 million for Borderlands 3 to be exclusive to the platform.
To put it more into perspective, Epic thought if they gave out free games, secured exclusives, and gave developers a better share of the sales, they would be able to get people to adopt their platform and secure 50% of the PC market. They previously said they expected to start bringing in an annual profit by 2023. Four years later, that strategy still hasn’t worked. Meanwhile, this past September, they laid off 16% of their workforce. When that fails, I suppose the next logical step is to sue your way to success. We’ll see how that works out for them this time.
The Epic Games Store launched in December 2018. It is still not profitable.
