Epic Games to donate all Fortnite proceeds for 2 weeks to Ukraine relief | Hacker News Reader

Epic Games to donate all Fortnite proceeds for 2 weeks to Ukraine relief

epicgames.com

58 pointst3rabytes13 comments

I'm somewhat surprised that the PR team here managed to avoid using the word "Russia" a single time.

I'm curious what the general consensus is as to why they would do that? I doubt it's an accident but I guess I can't rule it out.

At this point, they probably didn't think it was necessary to repeat what everyone outside russia knows?

They made it explicit in their statement about halting commerce in Russia:

https://twitter.com/EpicNewsroom/status/1500236775448588295?...

There are civilians from Ukraine (that belong to the other side of the conflict) that have been living in war conditions for the last 8 years. The aid agencies Epic chose are unbiased, and help civilians from both sides of the conflict. Hats of to Epic.

1. May be to avoid Russia = Putin scenario. As in they are not against Russians, but Putin.

2. Epic Games = ~45% Tencent. Which means there may be some small PR limitations to consider.

My first thought was how much is 2 weeks worth?

Are we talking 50K or 2M?

3.8% of annual revenue that was ~5B in 2020. So somewhere in the 200 Million range.

The thing is that it's not 3.8%(of a yearly profit), it's more. First thing that you should understand is that the new season started today, that means increase in micro transactions since many people will buy and level up their battle pass. Second thing is that payments on their fortnite crew subscription are happening in first days of the month, so it means that somewhere around 8.5% of their subscription revenue this year will be there too. My estimate that the total number would be closer to 7-8% of yearly profit.

This also might push some people over the edge to buy things now, so the number can soar. But also: this isn't a holiday season, so the baseline might be way lower than the average.

Epic Games was forced to pay Apple $6M because between August 2020 and October 2020, their direct payment method (on iOS alone) took in $12M.

Of course, Apple felt entitled those $6M were well deserved given the "curation" they provided. Plus exorbitant download fees or something. Sigh...

Anyway, 2 weeks is not pocket change.

> generated revenue of 3.7 billion U.S. dollars in 2019, down from 5.4 billion U.S. dollars in 2018

When googling “fortnight revenue” google gives me the above quote, so take that with all the salt you can carry. But it definitely sounds like north of 2m

The quote is from the lawsuit of Epic vs Apple, so quite trustworthy.

Funny how you took 2M as the "extreme" when the reality is at least 100 times that.

They have raised 36 million in the first 24 hrs

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