Here's the part posted to QJ:
It's worth noting the hypocrisy at work, because Epic is already poised to become the go-to guys for high quality graphics on mobiles by moving the Unreal 3 engine to them. Infinity Blade is probably the most spectacular game around in terms of pure eyecandy, and runs their engine. They also produced a free demo called Epic Citadel that's essentially a sales pitch for others to license their engine.
Now moving on to his concerns about how they're dieing over this, let's take a closer look at Infinity Blade.
It retails for $5.99 on Apple's store. According to Game Center, there are over 1.3 million scores currently being tracked. According to Appshopper, it has only gone on sale once for a period of five days from March 02-07.
So these are the assumptions I'm going to make: 1) the vast majority of customers purchased the game at full price. 2) While the Game Center stats cannot convey positive sales figures due to piracy, we also need to account for the fact that not everybody who buys it also uses Game Center. So we subtract some from column A, but add from column B and it may just balance out.
For every sale, 30% goes to Apple which is roughly $2. That leaves $4 for Chair. According to the licensing terms of the Unreal 3 engine, Epic collects 25% of their revenue after the first $50K. This means Chair pocketed the first 12,500 sales of Infinite Blade, and afterward have been paying Epic $1 per sale. That leaves them with $3 in profit.
So at the absolute best, Chair has fallen short of $4 million, and at worst we can estimate somewhere around $3 to $3.5 million. Even after you deduct salary and operating expenses (which are minimized because Apple operates the store--hence their cut) that's still a lot of money. And this isn't even taking into account their in-app sales--the success and extent of which is anybody's guess. In other words, all these micro sales add up to formidable profit.
And all the while, Epic is in the enviable position of collecting money for doing nothing past developing the engine that the game runs on. From Infinity Blade alone, they've pocketed over a million dollars. Perhaps its not enough for everybody to own personal jets, but I don't think they're in danger of going bust any time soon. Looking at Infinity Blade, one might argue that they stand to make more money than ever thanks to mobile gaming.
QUOTE said:
It's worth noting the hypocrisy at work, because Epic is already poised to become the go-to guys for high quality graphics on mobiles by moving the Unreal 3 engine to them. Infinity Blade is probably the most spectacular game around in terms of pure eyecandy, and runs their engine. They also produced a free demo called Epic Citadel that's essentially a sales pitch for others to license their engine.
Now moving on to his concerns about how they're dieing over this, let's take a closer look at Infinity Blade.
It retails for $5.99 on Apple's store. According to Game Center, there are over 1.3 million scores currently being tracked. According to Appshopper, it has only gone on sale once for a period of five days from March 02-07.
So these are the assumptions I'm going to make: 1) the vast majority of customers purchased the game at full price. 2) While the Game Center stats cannot convey positive sales figures due to piracy, we also need to account for the fact that not everybody who buys it also uses Game Center. So we subtract some from column A, but add from column B and it may just balance out.
For every sale, 30% goes to Apple which is roughly $2. That leaves $4 for Chair. According to the licensing terms of the Unreal 3 engine, Epic collects 25% of their revenue after the first $50K. This means Chair pocketed the first 12,500 sales of Infinite Blade, and afterward have been paying Epic $1 per sale. That leaves them with $3 in profit.
So at the absolute best, Chair has fallen short of $4 million, and at worst we can estimate somewhere around $3 to $3.5 million. Even after you deduct salary and operating expenses (which are minimized because Apple operates the store--hence their cut) that's still a lot of money. And this isn't even taking into account their in-app sales--the success and extent of which is anybody's guess. In other words, all these micro sales add up to formidable profit.
And all the while, Epic is in the enviable position of collecting money for doing nothing past developing the engine that the game runs on. From Infinity Blade alone, they've pocketed over a million dollars. Perhaps its not enough for everybody to own personal jets, but I don't think they're in danger of going bust any time soon. Looking at Infinity Blade, one might argue that they stand to make more money than ever thanks to mobile gaming.
