Fortnite is a massively popular battle royale video game title and it’s been available for several years now. Fans who want to enjoy this game typically had at least one avenue they could take in order to play this free-to-play video game. However, one major avenue was taken out and that’s Apple iOS platforms. This is all due to a legal back and forth action against Epic Games and Apple over how microtransactions are handled within applications.
If you’re not familiar with the recent legal cases, then it’s an interesting read. Fortnite, one of the biggest free battle royale video game titles was available on both Apple iOS and Google Android devices. It handled well and a large player base for the game actually came from iOS users. However, things changed when Epic Games offered players a way to directly purchase in-app content from Epic. Normally this is handled within the game that offers a split revenue so that each purchase Apple or Google would receive a cut. Epic Games was looking to bypass this and instead offered a direct method that not only allowed the company to keep its entire funds spent by the user but also give the players items at a discount.
When this was discovered both Google and Apple opted to remove the application from their storefronts and it’s forced Epic Games to fire a legal lawsuit over the matter. Apple, in particular, went a step further by also removing developer tools from Epic which means that they would not be able to create games for the iOS platform. Furthermore, their popular video game development engine, Unreal Engine, would not be able to use iOS developer tools.
Now there’s a legal back and forth going on but Epic Games went ahead and fired over another legal action against Apple to get their Fortnite game on the App Store until the final verdict is decided. This is due to Epic finding 60% of iOS players have dropped playing the game. This comes alongside the latest update which offers a Marvel crossover event that Apple users were not able to gain access to since Epic Games was not able to push out an update for users who currently had a copy installed on their device. For now, it’s a waiting game to see if Fortnite will get forced back into Apple’s storefront and just what the final verdict will determine.
