The Mobile Version of Fortnite Has Earned Epic Over a Billion in Microtransactions Alone

Fortnite is still the biggest video game to ever exist for reasons I still don’t quite understand, but if you ever needed a reminder of how big it exactly is, here’s a friendly reminder from the financial reports of our friends over at Sensor Tower: over the past two years, the mobile version alone has produced over $1 billion USD in microtransactions.

Let that sink in. A billion. With a B. And just from the mobile version. The amounts of money the PC and console version of the game have not been taken into account. Nor however much money Epic Games made teaming up with other commercial enterprises, like The Avengers or Star Wars. It also doesn’t take into account the enormous amount of money they almost certainly make from merchandising, or their eSports league.

So just this one fraction of the game has made a billion dollars. Holy crap.

Granted, things were pushed along thanks to COVID-19, with a 90 percent increase in sales thanks to people socially isolating in recent months. But while that may have pushed things along, it was still hurtling in that direction regardless, and this only saved Epic Games maybe a few months of time.

Also unsurprisingly, the United States is where Fortnite got most of its money, accounting for $632.2 million of that billion earned. Second place was Great Britain, who contributed significantly less to the total - around $38.2 million. The gap between second and third was much tighter, however, with Switzerland giving Epic Games $36.6 million.

With numbers like this, it makes a sick kind of sense that Epic Games would so strongly protest the notion of selling their game on the Google Play store: Google doesn’t take too big of a share of sales, but when you’re raking in billions, even a small percentage adds up.

But hey, congratulations on the success, Epic. Think you'll consider doing something with those billions?