"Looking at Unreal Engine, Epic only saw $124 million in revenue during 2018 and $97 million in revenue"It's solid, easily. A triple A game takes around $50-100 million today, but that's for the entire game, art and design and qa and all, over the course of say, 4 years. Even if Epic spends the higher end of that literally just on the engine alone, that's just $25 million a year. Costs beyond that are going to be relatively minimal in comparison. So, sure, it's not Fortnite. But over a hundred million a year in after tax profits would be a good product even for Apple, let alone anyone else.
From what I can see 2020 was $100 million. Mate they have >1000 employees OK a lot are working on fortnite and other things but I really don't see the engine being a big profit earner
Apples revenue was 2,745 times larger than Epics engine was in 2020. Picking some random mundane thing -> 'Ice cream cones' made magnitudes more revenue than epics engine in 2020 , sure for you and me 100 million revenue is heaps but for a big company its chump change.
Mate I was shocked how little it brings in, its the biggest engine used in the world by far, used in a string of high profile titles so like this guy I was expecting like 5-10x more
https://www.quora.com/What-generates-more-revenue-for-Epic-Games-Fortnite-or-Unreal-Engine
"Epic doesn’t releases exact numbers, but annual revenue from liscensing the Unreal Engine is probably somewhere in the ballpark of a billion dollars (give or take fifty percent)"
FWIW Unities revenue in 2019 was more than 5x Unreal Engines