Fortnite is one of the most popular and profitable video games of all time. It generates billions of dollars every year, and has taken Epic Games, already a very successful company before it launched Fortnite, into the stratosphere. Epic Games now stands shoulder-to-shoulder not only with big publishers like Activision, EA, and Ubisoft, but with platform holders like Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Valve. And it’s almost all thanks to Fortnite.
Related: More than 500 million Epic Games accounts have been created
How much would it cost to buy Fortnite?
Despite what you might have heard, Elon Musk does not intend to buy Fortnite so that he can then immediately shut it down and therefore save players from eternal virginity. That story was just a joke that got out of hand. But if Musk, or anyone else, did want to buy Fortnite, how much would they have to pay?
The short answer is: a lot. The long answer is that there’s no absolutely objective way to value a game franchise. When even economists and financiers value entire companies, they do so using a variety of methods, none of which actually reflects the sale price of a company, because that sale price is always going to be subject to negotiation. However, it is possible to estimate the sale price of a company and, to some extent, the sale price of an individual game franchise.
Let’s start with Epic Games’ equity valuation. This is basically the number of shares in the company held by all shareholders, multiplied by the price per share. In April 2022, Epic Games was valued at $32 billion using this method. And realistically, if a buyer wanted Fortnite, then they’d almost certainly buy Epic Games in its entirety. To do so, they’d have to pay significantly more than $32 billion.
But how much of that $32 billion can be attributed to Fortnite? Well, it’s certainly a lot of it. Epic Games has other major revenue streams — namely the Epic Games Store and the Unreal Engine — and they make a lot of money. But their revenues are dwarfed by the piles of cash that Fortnite rakes in. In its first four years, Fortnite made $21.1 billion in revenue. Not all of that is profit but, because Fortnite makes money by selling digital goods with basically no unit production costs, a huge chunk of it is.
One rough method of calculating the value of a business is to estimate the total amount of profit it’ll make in a future period, typically five years. So, if we assume that Fortnite will make as much money per year over the next five years as it made per year over its first four years, and make a valuation based on that, then Fortnite is worth about $27 billion. However, this is a very conservative estimate. Fortnite’s real value is probably even higher, and any buyer would expect to pay much more.
