The court case between Epic Games and Apple has resulted with documentation being made available to the public for the first time. One of these documents includes information on the amount Epic Games pay publishers / developers to have their titles included on the weekly Epic Games Free Games List.
Below is an analysis of the first 37 games given away for free on the Epic Games Store (excluding Metro 2033 Redux because its buyout price was zero) between December 2018 and September 2019. The Epic Store went live from December 2018.
“Entitlements” – the number of claims.
“Buyout Price” - the amount Epic pays a developer/publisher to have their title included in the Epic Games Free Games List.
“New Accounts” - what Epic designates as new accounts created in the store due to the free-away.
The top two entitled games were both Batman games. The second game, LEGO Batman, attained 4x the entitlement for every $1 buyout compared to the top game, Batman Arkham series of games.
In terms of the highest entitlements per buyout price, the average rate for the top five came to 48 entitlements per $1 spent on the buyout price. The average buyout price for the lowest five entitled games came to $52k compared to the buyout price for the top five entitled games of $780K .
Source: "Epic Games Store - Review of performance" made public by the court, Apple Dropbox
RiME was purchased for $45K and it was claimed 2.4 million times, making for an entitlement buyout ratio of 54.1. By contrast, Batman Arkham Asylum was purchased for $1.5 million and was claimed 6.5 million times, making for an entitlement buyout ratio of 4.3, almost 13x lower than RiME.
The top five games, with the highest buyout price, attained an average entitlement of 3.9 million claims. That comes to an average of 3.5 claims per $1 spent on buying the games.
One would think as the Epic Games Store got older and more new accounts were added , the number of entitlements would increase dramatically, but this is not the case. In the chart below, the free games listed in chronological order show the number of entitlements claimed. There is a very marginal increase over time, but the underlying trend is that entitlements increase based on the popularity of the free game given away. LEGO Batman was the only game to beat Subnautica’s entitlement level and that was nine months later.
Source: "Epic Games Store - Review of performance" made public by the court, Apple Dropbox
The biggest takeaway from the documentation is that Epic Games do not need to spend a great deal of money on buyouts to attain “bang for bucks” in terms of entitlements or new accounts. This is because in the first 9 months of the free giveaways, the number of entitlements stayed consistent at the 3 million mark. There were only two games to break this trend, Subnautica (the first title to go free) and LEGO Batman.