Epic Games has been investing hundreds of millions in its Store

When you think about the digital distribution of video games, there's pretty much only one name that comes to mind. Valve was the first game publisher to really push this concept and thanks to the first-mover advantage, Steam owns the lion's share of this market.

Epic Games is another game publisher with deep pockets. Over the past two years, Epic Games has invested a lot of money to try to get its Epic Games Store off the ground. Now there are some estimates about how much Epic Games has been pumping into its digital store, thanks to court documents filed by Apple in the case versus Epic Games.

PC Gamer writes Epic Games invested around $444 million on "minimum guarantees" to get exclusives on the Epic Games Store. The end-of-year report from Epic Games reveals third-party game sales accounted for just $256 million of customer spending -- so it's clear the Epic Games store is hemorrhaging a ton of money.

It's estimated that by the end of this year, factoring in all the exclusives and other expenses, the Epic Games Store will have recorded a loss of almost $600 million.

These estimates come from Apple's (pretty spicy) summary of the arguments it's bringing to court next month as it defends its App Store and iOS policies against Epic's antitrust complaint (I've uploaded the PDF here). As part of its defense, Apple's army of lawyers wants to show that the Epic Games Store isn't comparable to its iOS App Store, and so it has included everything Epic has said about how unprofitable the Epic Games Store is.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney chimed in via Twitter and calls this the cost of building "a great, profitable business." Whether the Epic Games Store effort will succeed is a big question though. Regular giveaways of free games have drawn a lot of temporary traffic to the Store -- but it doesn't seem to be luring people away from Steam.

Apple spins this as “losing money”, but spending now in order to build a great, profitable business in the future is exactly what investment is! It’s equally true whether you’re building a factory, a store, or a game.

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) April 10, 2021