Fortnite Earned More Money in 2018 Than Any Other Game Has Made in One Year

Not for nothing, but it really shouldn’t be news when we say “Fortnite is big”, but what might be more interesting is a discussion on how big it is, exactly. Is it bigger than, say, Minecraft? Have more people played it than the Pokemon games? Has it made more money than GTA V? All fascinating questions that I absolutely do not have the answer too.

But according to Superdata, there is one metric that’s easy to follow with Fortnite: money. Specifically, in ranking the games of 2018, they found that not only did Fortnite make the most of any other free-to-play game in 2018 (which is far from surprising), they’ve also made more in one year than any other video game as ever made in the same span of time. Indeed, it has earned the title of "the most annual revenue of any game in history”, by earning $2.4 billion last year alone, exclusively from microtransactions like in-game emotes, skins, and battle passes.

But Fortnite was far from the only successful free-to-play game. Free-to-play titles actually amassed 80 percent of all game revenue in 2018, thanks largely to their prominence in Asian markets. In the west, Premium games are still performing strong, although it’s still only a small fraction. Free-to-play games earned $87.7 billion in total last year, while premium games earned a far more modest $22.1 billion

So what does that mean? Not much, ultimately. Free-to-play games have been on the rise for a long, long time, and all this will do is cement the trend and increase the favor of triple-A game publishers who want to translate that enormous success to fully-priced games as well, because that would mean, you guessed it, more money for them.

Which sucks in some ways, of course, but at least 2018 also brought us Wandersong.