It seems that Italian games firm Digital Bros was paid €9.49m ($10.49m) by Epic for exclusive distribution rights for Remedy's Control on PC.
As spotted by Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad on Twitter (below), a recent financial report from the 505 Games parent firm for the three months ending June 30th says that it was paid €9.49m for exclusivity for Remedy's latest release. The document is in Italian, with Tom's Hardware Italia's new editor Nicola Armondi (below) kindly stepping in to translate for us lazy English speakers!
Digital Bros, parent company of 505 Games, has disclosed that they received a payment of 9.49 million euro from Epic Games for Control.
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) September 20, 2019
Which I would imagine is for exclusivity.
55% of that payment going to 505 Games.
Report here: https://t.co/ocmbIQeOfJ
Fast English translation: "Revenue come from the computer version of Control. The game was released on august 27 but the structure of the marketplace who requested the pc exclusivity has made possible to gain the revenue starting from this quarter".
— Nicola Armondi (@Nicola_Armondi) September 20, 2019
Assuming that this figure paid for exclusivity is a minimum guarantee on sales - as was the case with Glumberland with Ooblets - then that means that Epic has guaranteed between around 160,000 and 180,000 copies of Control on its platform. Only once the game has sold more than that amount - which was paid upfront before launch - will Remedy and Digital Bros start to see more revenue from Control on PC, meaning there will likely be little to no cashflow from the title on the Epic Games Store when they report their next round of financials.
When 505 Games and Remedy signed their deal for Control, the agreement said that 45 per cent of revenue would be going to the former, with the Finnish developer picking up the remaining 55 per cent. That means that Remedy is now €5.22m ($5.7m) better off, while Control's Italian publisher has benefitted to the tune of €4.27m ($4.7m).
This deal also means that via the Epic Games Store alone, Remedy is either a quarter or a sixth of the way to recovering its development budget for Control. Speaking at Devcom, the studio's CEO Tero Virtala said that the title's production budget was between €20m ($22.2m) and €30m ($33.3m). In an interview with PCGamesInsider.biz later that week, the exec said that these lower budgets not only reduced the risk of releasing a game, but also increased Remedy's ability to be creative.
Going back to Digital Bros' financials, Bloodstained was the company's best performing premium title for the three months ending June 30th, bringing in €13.9m in revenue. Overall, the Italian firm saw gross revenue of €81.3m ($89.3m) for the quarter, a 6.9 per cent increase year-on-year. The company's premium game segment was behind the majority of that figure, raking in €60.4m ($66.3m). That's an 11.6 per cent increase year-on-year.
