Meiam said:
250 millions in a years doesn't seem that impressive considering they had big exclusive like BL3 and outer world, would love to see comparison with other distribution service though.
No, it doesn't seem much. It's not entirely clear, but it seems like that $250 mil spent on the Epic Store is before Epic's cut, which is 12%, so their actual income would only be $30 mil. Makes me wonder if the store is self-sustaining without Fortnite money, since on top of operating costs they've been aggressively incentivizing people to use their platform through exclusives, giveaways, coupons and such, none of which is likely to have come for free. Tho I guess it's not unusual for a new platform like this to run in the red initially.
Can't find much recent info on consumer spending from other distributors. Steam's gross total sales were $4.2 billion in 2017 [https://www.statista.com/statistics/547025/steam-game-sales-revenue/]. Steam is of course a far larger and more well-established platform, and things have obviously changed in 2019: the Epic Store wasn't a thing yet, nor was Xbox Game Pass and I've seen indications sales of indies on Steam are down significantly (possibly due to Epic, maybe other platforms including Switch which by all accounts seems a favorable device for indies, both with players and developers). In short, it's doubtful that $4.2b is still representative.
I also found an article on GOG's 2018 revenue [https://www.tweaktown.com/news/65367/gog-com-barely-making-profit/index.html], which was $34 mil. Apparently they only made a paltry $7,800 profit off that after costs, even tho operating in Poland is so cheap compared to most other locations. Though GOG is of course not CD Project Red's main source of income.
Does Horace has some kind of connection to the escapist? It feature in the video on the store page.
Don't think so. The Escapist part seems to be from a review or feature or such. They probably just wanted some footage of a media outlet praising their game in their video, but a quick search seems to indicate few bigger name sites did an article on it, let alone videos, aside from Yathzee and the Escapist, and beggars can't be choosers.
