Epic Games has finally given up and is releasing Fortnite on Google Play Store. The company has been resisting Google’s Play Store release of Fortnite for 18 months and was serving the app to its users via its website. The reason was the conflict of interest with Google’s Play Store policy for developers.
Google charges developers 30 percent of what they earn from in-app purchases, which makes it challenging to manage, said Epic’s CEO, Tim Sweeney, back in August 2018 when the Fortnite was released and mentioned again when the game was released for Android.
“The 30 percent store tax is a high cost in a world where game developers’ 70 percent must cover all the cost of developing, operating, and supporting their games. 30 percent is disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform, such as payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service.”
The company’s CEO has previously criticized App Store’s and Play Store’s policies for abusing their position and charging more than necessary from developers. Epic now has to pay a 30-percent cut to Google in order to maintain in-app purchases following Play Store rules.
In an effort to avoid Steam, Epic Games even launched their game store for its games back in December 2018, for the same reason that they’ve been avoiding Play Store. However, the company has now released its Android app on Google Play.
“Google puts software downloadable outside of Google Play at a disadvantage,” reads Epic’s statement.
Here’s the complete statement from Epic,
“After 18 months of operating Fortnite on Android outside of the Google Play Store, we’ve come to a basic realization. Google puts software downloadable outside of Google Play at a disadvantage, through technical and business measures such as scary, repetitive security pop-ups for downloaded and updated software, restrictive manufacturer and carrier agreements and dealings, Google public relations characterizing third-party software sources as malware, and new efforts such as Google Play Protect to outright block software obtained outside the Google Play store.”
Whenever a user tries to sideload an APK which is not from the Play Store, the Android system prompts the user to be careful as it can be a malware. This can impact the downloads of the game, which Epic Games is trying to do without the Play Store involvement and can stop users from sideloading the app.
You can still sideload Fortnite on Android from Epic’s website, but the app is now available on Google Play, so you can download it from there too.
