Fortnite Removed From Google Play Store And Apple App Store (Aug 2020)

Fortnite removed from Google Play Store and Apple App Store after the violation of their guidelines. On Thursday 14th of August, The game was taken down by both the major App marketplaces. Which created a huge ruckus in the mobile gaming around the world.

Both Google and Apple said they removed Fortnite because Epic Games (its developer) violated their guidelines as they announced other way for players to buy in-game currency, bypassing Google and Apple’s payment systems.

Fortnite is a overwhelmingly popular game around the world. It possesses millions of players registered from their app stores.

Epic Games Sues Google and Apple

After getting blocked by the leading marketplaces, the maker of Fortnite is suing Apple and Google. Its pretty clear now that the Epic games was ready with the suit as the complaint filed is about 60 pages each. It seems that Christine Varney (Lawyer involved in Obama administration Suit) is also involved in this.

Not only that, Epic is mocking both the Companies each with parody of apple’s 1984 ad and Google’s “Don’t Be Evil ” slogan. The parody video shows Apple as a villain in its own ad and it accuses Google of Relegating its motto.

How & When

On Thursday, Epic Games announced that they will offer a permanent discount of 20% on Fornite’s in-game currency if the players make a direct purchase from Epic itself.

Epic says Apple and Google gets a 30% fee cut from every purchase made from respective app stores. And they will not allow the 20% price drop from it. Epic states that they are willing to pass the savings to the buyers if Apple and Google drops their fees.

Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeney has publicly criticized both the cornerstones of the global App merchants, for their cut percentage on in-app purchases. Hours later to that, Apple removes Fortnite from their store followed by a lawsuit from Epic.

Later that day, Google also announced that they had removed Fortnite from Google Play Store as they cannot comprehend the violation of guidelines and safety of their users.

Yet both the companies has stated that they are willing to bring back the Fortnite game to their respective stores under the right circumstances.

Epic responded with another lawsuit, and this time it was Google. Epic claims that Google uses its size to suppress the competitors, innovators, customers and users for ones own evil wishes.

Imbalanced Relationships

Epic has always found it difficult to co-op with other major app stores. In 2018, when Epic decided to release Fortnite on mobile devices, they chose not to release the game on Google Play Store. Instead they made users around the world download the game from their own website.

In April 2020, Epic releases Fornite on Google Play Store two years after the game launched for iOS. Epic states that it finally made a move because outside downloads gets both the software and the user at disadvantage as it gets affected by malware in general.

After that, Epic was prepared to launch its own software marketplace as Sweeney said, it isn’t appropriate for the marketplaces to take such a huge amount from the developers revenue. Epic says, its own app store would take way smaller cut of 12% only.

With that being said, we will be waiting for the next update on this controversy. To know more about it, stay tuned.

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