Epic Games Spent $146 Million Securing Borderlands 3's PC Exclusivity For Six Months


We're getting all the details about Epic Games this morning. With their legal battle against Apple landing in court yesterday, it's revealed a significant number of details about upcoming Rocket League and Fortnite plans, but also shines a light on past business.

Since launching in December 2018, the Epic Games Store has made a significant push to compete against Steam, offering free games every week, whilst also paying numerous publishers for PC exclusivity. The latter's seen extensive criticism from players, and one major exclusive was 2019's Borderlands 3.

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Epic Games Spent $146 Million Securing Borderlands 3's PC Exclusivity For Six Months

Normally, Epic Games don't reveal how much they've paid for exclusivity, but as a result of the court documents for this legal battle, we now know what Borderlands 3 cost. As noted by GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless, Epic Games spent $146 million for six months exclusivity, before launching on Steam in March 2020.

Offering a "fully loaded Borderlands 3 deal" to 2K Games, Epic Games paid $115m for the game itself - with a minimum guarantee of $80m to ensure it makes enough money to claw that back - spending $15m in marketing, and a one-off $20m fee. These documents also note $11m for Borderlands: The Handsome Collection, and Civilization 6 cost $20m.

In terms of whether it paid off, these documents confirm they made back 100% of that minimum guarantee in just two weeks, generating $100m altogether. From this, Epic took $9.2 million as part of their 12% cut, and 53% of buyers were new Epic Games Store users.

For more articles like this, take a look at our Borderlands 3, Gaming News, and PC Gaming pages.