Leaked data from Epic vs Apple trial might give us clues about Shenmue III budget and performance

[JCJ]

Today I stumbled into an article about the performance of Epic Games Store financed games, that I think could be interesting to us all.

The article is https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/real-data-inside-epics-plans-for (I discovered it from a Resetera thread), and it contains a figure that details how much was the "Minimum Guarantee" (MG) that Epic estimated for every game, and how much of that money they recouped trough sales. If I interpret it correctly, that MG number is the money EGS gave the publisher in advance, and the money the game has to surpass in sales in order to get any more income.

The figure is this one:

Unfortunately, the game names have been censored, but we know Shenmue III was a 4Q19 one. And if we assume the money received from Epic was less than $9 million, then it's one of the "Tier 3" ones. Analyzing that portion of the chart, the conclusion is Deep Silver received between 0,8 and 5 million dollars, and that the actual revenue was really far from that.

Which one do you think Shenmue III could be?

 

[24Nathan]

I think we know that Epic invested $10 million, or am I remembering a theory? I can't remember. I wish we knew what the colors represented. We know Koch was fairly positive about III's performance as a "niche title", and that "financially, it did fine". But you do have to wonder what that meant for Epic.

 

[orient]

If the pink represents money that wasn't recouped on these exclusivity deals then here's the upswing: Shenmue III only did as poorly as almost every other game they bought

I know, I know, they mostly care about user acquisition. S3 might've done well for them in that regard.

 

[JCJ]

I think we know that Epic invested $10 million, or am I remembering a theory? I can't remember. I wish we knew what the colors represented. We know Koch was fairly positive about III's performance as a "niche title", and that "financially, it did fine". But you do have to wonder what that meant for Epic.

I'm pretty sure the pink represents how much money the game has to reach in sales (on the Epic Store) until the publisher gets any new dollar. So, I guess that will probably be really close to the amount of money Epic invested, and That would mean the Shenmue III investments would be 5 million dollars at most. (I wouldn't discard that there might be a a fixed additional amount of money for the developer, though, but I doubt it would have reached to double the amount).

The dark gray is the money the game actually sold at the date of this report. And the light grey is the amount Epic still expected the game to sell in the future. Both graphs are superimposed on the pink one, thus the more gray the bar is, the more profitable the investment has been to Epic.

And the graph shows that most investments have been disastrous...which probably speaks worse about the platform than about the actual games.