Fortnite publisher and developer Epic Games just made a blockbuster announcement.
Epic shared the news on their site:
“Telefónica, one of the largest telecommunications service providers in the world, and Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite, today announced a long term partnership to make Fortnite and the Epic Games Store more accessible on millions of Telefónica Android devices.
As a first step in this partnership, the Epic Games Store will now be pre-installed on all new compatible Android devices on the Telefónica network in Spain, UK, Germany and Spanish-speaking Latam. Players will now be able to more easily download Fortnite, Fall Guys and Rocket League Sideswipe as well as third party games in the future. This is just the beginning, and over the next year the companies plan to expand the partnership and bring more benefits to mobile players across the Telefónica network.”
As you can intuit from the press release, Telefónica is a telecommunications company that provides mobile services in Europe and Latin America. This is one of those million dollar deals that guarantees that both sides are going to make a lot of money. It also brings up an interesting wrinkle in the Epic vs. Google lawsuit, and how this could show what Microsoft – and maybe also Sony – will be doing in the future.
It really shouldn’t be a surprise that Epic can get their mobile store onto Android without asking Google, and without winning their case. While Google wants to close certain parts of Android, the platform is still open enough to make this whole thing possible. See, OEMs are free to install and prepackage apps and packages on their Android devices as they wish. It’s the reason that Samsung has their own store, and many other OEMs do the same thing.
In fact, Huawei and Amazon have their own forks of Android where they put up their own storefronts for apps, called HarmonyOS and Fire OS, respectively. These are customized to their own devices, but you know that they would love for Google to lose their case and bring their stores to all Android devices too.
So Epic’s move is a signal to Microsoft and other possibly interested game publishers that they can do the same exact thing. Remember when Microsoft said they were ready to let players play Xbox games on Android but the case blocked them from doing so? Well, now Microsoft can plainly see they can make a deal with a service provider like Telefónica to make it happen.
As some fans have pointed out, this would effectively make Epic Games Store bloatware on those Telefónica devices, but based on this press release, Epic doesn’t see it as a bad thing at all. Tim Sweeney may have gotten the last laugh after he lambasted Google for their deceitful statement about the Xbox app situation.
Now it may be too early to jump to conclusions. Google may once again find a way to block this move, perhaps by threatening Telefónica if they don’t have legal means. But we admit we would be speculating at this point. We will see how Google will now respond in the coming weeks.
