Surprise! Fortnite and other free to play games are still making a ton of cash

Well here’s some absolutely shocking news: Free to play games are still doing gangbusters numbers on the digital frontier, raking in absurd numbers that other game developers would kill for with their premium titles. That’s according to Superdata, whose year in review post for 2019 painted a very green picture for the freemium industry.

While 2019 was far from a record-setting year, Epic Games and other studios who offer games for gratis while hooking in a few whales along the way still had plenty to smile about. Fortnite was once again rolling in the Benjamins, having pocketed a cool $1.8 billion in 2019, easily securing top spot as the most profitable game of the year by a country mile. Overall, digital games made a lot of buck with four out of every five dollars going towards free to play games and making over $120 billion which was broken up into the following slices of profit:

• Mobile games – $64.4 billion
• PC games – $29.6 billion
• Combined console game sales – $15.4 billion

YouTube and Twitch’s gaming videos and streams also accounted for some of that dolla dolla, with XR revenue having climbed by 26% to $6.3 billion in 2019 thanks to the emergence of new headsets like the Oculus Quest. Long story short: Even in a year which didn’t set the sales charts on fires, video games were still obscenely profitable as games and interactive media industry grew 4% in a year with few market movers according to Superdata.

It’s amazing just how much money something “free” can make, right?

Last Updated: January 6, 2020