In brief: While it's no secret that Epic is paying a lot of money to bring title exclusively to its Epic Games Store, the company has never revealed exact figures. Now, however, we know how much it paid for Control, one of the year's biggest and best games: $10.49 million.
The information comes courtesy of an Italian earnings report from publisher 505 Games' parent company, Digital Bros., which was highlighted by Niko Partners senior analyst Daniel Ahmad. It shows that the exclusivity deal for Control was worth €9.49 million ($10.49 million).
"Revenue comes from the computer version of Control," reads a translated part of the report. "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."
In July, Ooblets developer Glumberland revealed that its Epic exclusivity deal offered "a minimum guarantee on sales that would match what we'd be wanting to earn if we were just selling Ooblets across all the stores."
As Ars Technica notes, if Digital Bros. got a similar deal, it won't get any more money from the Epic Games Store's sales of Control until it earns back the €9.49 million upfront payment, which means selling 200,000 units or more.
There remains a large portion of people who resent games becoming Epic store exclusives, as proved by the backlash to Borderlands 3, Metro Exodus, Shenmue 3, Ooblets, and pretty much every title that announces deals. But Epic isn't slowing down when it comes to securing these games and is willing to pay millions for them.