Epic Games paid over $11 million for free games until September 2019

The interesting documents given to us from the Epic vs Apple trial keep on coming, this time giving us information on just how much Epic Games paid for their free games up until September 2019. 

The document was spotted and tweeted by GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless, whos find lists all the free games that were given away on the Epic Games Store up until September 2019, and exactly how much was paid for them.

The list shows a wide range of payments from Epic Games that will no doubt make some of those on the list quite miffed. Ubisoft, for instance, only got $63,000 for For Honor, while Funcom received $1,000,000 for Mutant Year Zero only two weeks later.

Topping out as the most expensive game on the list is Batman Arkham from Warner Bros. which received a staggering $1,500,000 to be given away for free. Meanwhile Koch Media’s Metro: 2033 Redux was given to Epic, then given away by Epic for absolutely nothing. 

Want to know how much $ the devs of those 'free' Epic Games Store games got, & how many copies were grabbed? Here's the first 9 months to September 2019. ? pic.twitter.com/5hkLb1VEjj

— Simon Carless (@simoncarless) May 3, 2021

This list doesn’t just show how much Epic paid for each title, which would be interesting enough on its own. But also how many times each title was redeemed, and also how many new Epic accounts were created for that free game. 

The most successful title in that regard was the first free game, Subnautica, which drew in a staggering 804,052 new accounts to the platform, whilst being redeemed a total of 4,634,826 times. 

This resulted in a cost of $1.74 per new user, far higher than the cheapest user attractor of World Of Goo, which brought in 115,215 new users at only a cost of $0.32 apiece.