Fortnite has earned Epic Games a substantial amount of money, according to recent reports. This comes as no surprise as everyone and their mother's been playing Fortnite every waking hour since the inception of its Battle Royale mode.
Granted, there have been a couple of problems (read: lawsuits 1, 2, and 3) along the way, but it is without a doubt that we can say that Epic Games are in a great place to kickstart some of their alternative projects as it stands.
Fortnite has just about reached Minecraft-levels of fame at the time of writing, and the profit (yes, profit - not revenue) it's been earning for the developer and publisher, Epic Games, is downright staggering, according to sources. Fortnite has earned about $3 billion - yes, that's $3,000,000,000 - in 2018 alone.
What fueled Epic Games' current success happened back in 2012, when a massive Chinese tech-firm, Tencent, invested $330 million in exchange for a substantial 40% stake in Epic. Subsequently, Epic pivoted away from tried-and-true Unreal and Gears of War types of experiences in order to focus on games-as-a-service.
When Fortnite release, it was met with mediocre success until - mostly as a joke - Epic released its Battle Royale component. The rest, as they say, is history, and so Epic became the behemoth which is now trying to compete with Steam. A true success story, to be sure, and Epic have shown that they're fairly capable when it comes to freemium games, too. Who knows what the future holds!
