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Aimi

self-requested ban
Banned
Jan 16, 2021
579


Assuming "Entitlements" implies number of Copies redeemed and "UA" cost might be User Acquisition cost, so cost per new acquisition (Game buyout price divided by new users gained). Correct me if I'm wrong.
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ToddBonzalez

The Pyramids? That's nothing compared to RDR2
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
15,530
Glad to see indie devs getting paid. Hopefully these figures were split between the development team.
 

Bigkrev

Member
Oct 25, 2017
12,326
I mentioned this in the Epic Trial thread, but the most fascinating thing here is that Inside and Celeste- arguably the 2 most critically acclaimed games that were offered in this window- were the biggest "failures" of the program. It's clear that Epic treats the free games as a way to get new Epic Accounts, as they provide not just the number of new accounts, but the "cost" of each new account and the percentage that was new. Fez and Inside ended up having very few people create accounts to claim the games, leading to the stat of $11 and $12 "cost" of each new account created, both of which are close to double the other most "expensive" games. It seems like people interested in Inside and Celeste were already established players

Also, I know that because it was part of a Doxing that it's not the most kosher thing in the world to discuss, but I know that the contract for Fez to appear on Playstation Plus a few years after it's release was part of that, I wonder what the price Sony paid was vs what Epic paid years later for the same game
 

Lobster Roll

signature-less, now and forever
Member
Sep 24, 2019
34,380
What's funny about this chart is that recently there was a thread about Phil Spencer saying that there's not a formal strategy for obtaining GamePass games, and I'm sure they have an extremely similar chart where it's just all depending on the negotiated needs and buyout price between the two companies. Getting a peek behind the curtain and seeing the wildly fluctuating buyout prices is interesting, that's for sure.
 

jman2050

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
5,805
Some of these indie devs got jobbed hard.

Y'all need to either negotiate better or hire someone to do it for you.
 

Kolx

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,505
These are... very cheap? I expected it to be much higher. I wonder if Sony and MS had to pay the same or higher considering their bigger userbase at the time.
 

Biggzy

Member
Oct 27, 2017
2,929
This court case really has given us a fascinating insight behind the curtain as to how these companies operate.
 

HockeyBird

Member
Oct 27, 2017
12,591
Some devs made out pretty good while others got short changed. A $1 to $15 price each new user isn't too bad of a price for Epic. Essentially should each use would just need to buy one indie game to break even and more. But it sounds like very few new users actually did buy something so it's unclear what the final math works out to be.
 

Raigor

Member
May 14, 2020
15,146
These are... very cheap? I expected it to be much higher. I wonder if Sony and MS had to pay the same or higher considering their bigger userbase at the time.

Old stuff is cheap. It would be interesting to see Metro Exodus or Borderlands 3 exclusivity deals. Here is the real money.
 

dex3108

Member
Oct 26, 2017
22,608
Why it is surprising to see those low numbers? Many indie devs are really bad with business side of indie life.
 

Morten88

Member
Dec 22, 2019
1,849
Old stuff is cheap. It would be interesting to see Metro Exodus or Borderlands 3 exclusivity deals. Here is the real money.
This was posted in the pc gaming thread

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Tygre

Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,116
Chesire, UK
Gotta keep in mind that this is a partial picture without a lot of the surrounding explanation.

You can make some inferences, but I wouldn't jump to many firm conclusions without the supplementary materials.
 

t26

Avenger
Oct 27, 2017
4,559
Assuming PlayStation plus and game with gold are around the range, you would think MS can get better free games for gold
 

Ctrl Alt Del

Banned
Jun 10, 2018
4,312
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Obviously those values amounting to millions are huge, but for a company like Epic it doesn't look like anything ludicrous. Prolly a decent deal overrall if they're gonna take a loss on that anyway.
 

Deleted member 46948

Account closed at user request
Banned
Aug 22, 2018
8,852
This lawsuit is going to be a gold mine of behind the curtains info.
I'm pretty sure a lot of those companies aren't very happy about it.
 

Kinthey

Avenger
Oct 27, 2017
22,328
I'd assume that they will have calculated those buyout prices through how much the game has sold in recent months.

This lawsuit is going to be a gold mine of behind the curtains info.
I'm pretty sure a lot of those companies aren't very happy about it.
I guess this could already lead to some trouble

"But you sold your game to Epic for just 50k, why should I give you a 100k"
 

poklane

Member
Oct 25, 2017
27,932
the Netherlands
Consider me somewhat surprised that it appears to be just a flat fee, I always thought at least some publishers/developers would get a bonus based on how many people claim the game.
Assuming PlayStation plus and game with gold are around the range, you would think MS can get better free games for gold
Microsoft doesn't want people subbing to Gold for the free games tho, they want you to sub to Game Pass if you want to play games. I honestly don't understand why they haven't just killed off the whole Games with Gold thing.
 

.exe

Member
Oct 25, 2017
22,240
Playdead knows how to negotiate. They got a nice chunk of change out of Limbo, which I'd think everyone and their mum owns by now.
 

Deleted member 27751

User-requested account closure
Banned
Oct 30, 2017
3,997
The new user percentages is what I find most interesting. There is nothing over 15% of new user draw ins, to the point where only one or two reach anything high like 10%. This suggests to me just how little impact the free games had on their backend of gathering users, and honestly makes me question how many people buying games are just Fortnite people who are already in the system. This is definitely not sustainable at all like was said in that court doc.

Indies stay winning though, any money is good money. Just a shame the value proposition is only good thanks to the buyout, with little to no real break even on many. So really it's an easy cash grab but nothing else as I'm not sure if any broken past the requirements. This really makes me think Epic can easily pull free games due to the low value it has.
 

Eoin

Member
Oct 27, 2017
7,103
I wonder how they're splitting user acquisition for the weeks where they had several games. Like Batman: Arkham Knight and LEGO Batman both went up on the same day, and although it is extremely obvious that more people would be interested in Arkham, it looks like almost everyone who redeemed one of them also redeemed the other.

I presume they are just going by whichever one it was that new users clicked on first, since although that wouldn't be totally accurate, it'd probably be accurate enough for them to work with.

Wish it included the GTA Numbers, those would have been interesting to see
Yeah, would be especially interesting because that offer collapsed the store, so knowing it would give some some idea of the capacity of the store at the time of that offer.

Some of these indie devs got jobbed hard.
RiME and World of Goo especially had a low price for the numbers that they attracted to the services.

Ubisoft got a really low price for For Honor as well, although by that point it seemed pretty clear that they just wanted as many players of that game as possible to sell DLC to, so maybe any kind of offer was fine with them.

Getting a peek behind the curtain and seeing the wildly fluctuating buyout prices is interesting, that's for sure.
Yeah I think this is something that'll probably stabilise over time as platform holders get used to subscriber metrics. For all of this time period Epic were probably just chaotically learning about the games market, with their weekly experiences veering between reinforcing their assumptions and smashing those assumptions to bits. Microsoft and Sony (and 2021 Epic) are probably in a bit of a different place when it comes to numbers like these.
 

thediamondage

Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,277
Those prices were way, way, way lower than I expected, kinda surprising. They were paying $500k-1m for most games total and only a few hundred thousand were claimed, its interesting how few copies were claimed of pretty high rated indie games but something like Arkham Knight, which is like 6 (?) years old now and goes on sale all the time for like $5, was claimed an order of magnitude more than other games.
 

bsigg

Member
Oct 25, 2017
22,556
We really need a "Epic v Apple documents" thread to aggregate everything that's been released.
 

DJwest

Member
Oct 26, 2017
7,152
By the end of this lawsuit, we'll know the colour of everyone's underwear lol. It's only day one and we've learnt so much
 

Deleted member 46948

Account closed at user request
Banned
Aug 22, 2018
8,852
I'd assume that they will have calculated those buyout prices through how much the game has sold in recent months.


I guess this could already lead to some trouble

"But you sold your game to Epic for just 50k, why should I give you a 100k"

Video game journalists are going to be milking this thing for months, at least.
I'm sure they had access to much of this before, but now that it's out in the wild, they can actually write about it.
 

Metroidvania

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,772
I'm...confused on that Borderlands 3 graphic.

It implies that Epic paid for 80 million worth of sales 'in advance'.....but then only took away 12% of that revenue (the 77 mil of sales)...so does that minimum sales advance not count for the 12%, because epic takes 100% of that already?

But if they do, aren't they double-charging for the 12% on top of the money they're 'owed' already by the minimum sales guarantee?

(Sidenote, 1.56 mil pc players doesn't seem like all that much for a borderlands game, unless I'm missing something - Borderlands 2 had 22 mil sales, albeit with many a discount/sale)