It feels like yesterday, but it was actually four years ago when Apple and Google removed Fortnite from the App Store and the Play Store. Epic Games, fully prepared for this, even released a commercial shortly after the removal, sowing the seeds for what has now led to a significant development in iOS and, in particular, the App Store.
Fast forward to today: Fortnite, the popular battle royale game, is making a comeback to iOS. However, it won’t be available in the App Store. Instead, it’ll be accessible through an anticipated third-party store owned by the developer itself: the Epic Games Store.
Fortnite is back. As confirmed by the official Epic Games X account on Saturday, the company has submitted both the Epic Games Store and Fortnite to Apple for notarization. It’s important to note that even if apps are published in third-party stores, Apple still conducts a review process to ensure compliance with its minimum standards.
Dates. While Epic hasn’t confirmed when it’ll launch the new Epic store and the iOS version of Fortnite, the video game developer expects them to be available within the next two months in the European Union. In fact, for now, third-party stores will only be available for European users due to local regulations. There is no news as to when or if they’ll come to other countries. On the Android side, users can download the official APK from the Fortnite website.
Epic is taking a stand against the App Store. Epic has made it clear that it’ll continue to challenge Apple. The Epic Games Store aims to be a comprehensive game repository, including third-party projects. As such, it needs to be attractive to developers. To achieve this, Epic will only charge a 12% commission, in contrast to the 30% charged by Apple and Google. There’s no denying that significant changes are coming to iOS.
What happened to Fortnite? On August 13, 2020, Epic Games updated Fortnite and introduced a direct payment system. In short, this allowed users to buy in-game currency, V-Bucks, through a third-party system, bypassing Apple and Google’s gateway and the associated 30% commission. Google and Apple removed the game from their stores in a matter of hours, an action that led to a years-long lawsuit and ended up forcing Apple to open up its ecosystem.
Image | Epic Games Store
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