https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210504/12123446732/fortnite-free-game-made-9-billion-two-years.shtml

For years -- years! -- Techdirt has been a place that has argued that offering a product or service for free, where that made sense, could actually be a fantastic business model. While there are lots of examples of that sort of thing these days, you have to understand that this concept was met with derision and scorn by all kinds of industry folks big and small. Some said anyone offering something for free had no clue how to run a business. Others even more absurdly claimed that there was literally no way to compete with "free."

Well, the video game industry has long claimed to have a "free" problem when it comes to piracy. The problem with combining those claims with claims that you can't compete with that sort of thing is that the success stories are there and you don't exactly have to look hard for them. Back in 2018, we talked about Fortnite, a free game that makes its money in all other sorts of ways. And by "its money" I mean that it was making $300 million per month. But then there were claims that all of this was some flash in a pan rather than anything sustainable. The problem with that is that, thanks to the trial just kicking off between Apple and Epic, internal Epic documents indicate that Fortnite made the company $9 billion over the course of two years.