Fortnite CREDIT: EPIC GAMES
We’ve gotten free gliders, back blings and pickaxes before, but this particular giveaway has those all beat handily. This is still unconfirmed, but an accidental news update in Fortnite: Battle Royale last night hinted at a major Epic Games Store promotion inside of Fortnite. Epic quickly pulled the news update, but not before plenty of people took screenshots:
It might be a bit before this makes it into the game, but it certainly looks like a legitimate leak. Going off of this post, it looks like Epic will be giving anyone who enables two-factor-authentication on their Fortniteaccount $10 to spend in the Epic Games store. Which, combined with the Epic’s monthly drop of excellent free games, means that you can actually get quite a lot of mileage from the Epic Games Store without spending a dime. If only the storefront let me sort games by price. You can at least get Flower for under $10, and Flower is a good game.
Theoretically–and I’m using that word in its most expansive form–this could cost upwards of $2 billion. There are over 200 million Fortniteplayers, so if each and every one of them redeemed this promotion, it would cost a massive chunk of change. The actual situation is likely to be very different. The Epic Games Store is a PC app, so right off we’re likely eliminating console and mobile players, which is likely more than half of the player base. After that, only a small fraction of players are likely to actually redeem, because plenty of those 200 million are lapsed, not particularly engaged, or just won’t do this for whatever reason. And even after that, a ton of those players are likely to just turn around and spend that money on V-bucks instead of other games, and the economics for Epic there are very different: it’s even possible that some of those V-buck purchases could convert some free players to paid, so it actually makes them some money.
That doesn’t mean this isn’t a big spend. Even with all those caveats, it seems like Epic is going to be shelling out a non-trivial amount of money to developers selling games on the Epic Games Store, which I’m sure those companies are plenty happy about. The motivation here is clear: first, more players with 2FA enabled is always good for Epic’s security. But more importantly, it wants you to use that game store. The company is spending a huge amount of money to take on Steam’s dominance in PC game sales, and so far it seems to be working. And as Steam has proven, there is a ton of money available to the company that sells people their PC games.
Fortnite Info 