Infinity Blade 'Earned Revenue' Tops $10M

Chair Entertainment and parent Epic Games said Tuesday that their hit mobile game, the Unreal Engine 3-powered iOS title Infinity Blade, has topped $10 million in "earnings" in its first six months. Infinity Blade, a sword-fighting action game, was released in December 2010 on Apple’s App Store, and was the first iOS title from Epic and Chair. The game sells for $5.99 on the store, and works on iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Epic said that game’s success has triggered “significant licensing interest” in UE3 on mobile devices, noting an “uptick” in licenses for commercial iOS games. Epic VP and co-founder Mark Rein said in a statement, "Infinity Blade's success proves that triple-A gaming experiences can be hugely successful on iOS and that there is a valuable, pent up demand for premium content like this.” “We have been licensing Unreal Engine 3 very affordably to developers large and small for all kinds of games and applications and we're looking forward to our licensees achieving spectacular results of their own,” he added. Epic recently said that Unreal Development Kit, the free version of UE3, has reached 800,000 unique installations since its December 2010 release. [UPDATE: Rein explained exactly what the company meant by earnings in an email to Gamasutra -- as opposed to other reports, the $10 million is not total sales, but money in Epic's pocket. Rein said the figure represents "earned revenue ... that's how much we've earned from the store after Apple deducts their portion from the sales to end users."]