Apple Kicks Fortnite Off App Store

This is not a drill. In a shocking move by Apple, Fortnite has been kicked off from the App Store. This is probably in response to Epic’s decision of making its V-Bucks available to the players directly through their website. They also permanently discounted the V-bucks prices by 20%.

Epic’s Fortnite gamble fails

In a recent blog post, Epic said, “Today, we’re also introducing a new way to pay on iOS and Android: Epic direct payment. When you choose to use Epic direct payments, you save up to 20% as Epic passes along payment processing savings to you.”

This was because the App Store and the Play Store charge a 30% cut on the transactions. This is a fee to ensure smooth and secure transactions and for maintaining the store. But clearly, Epic did not want to pay that extra 30% to the companies and decided to give the players a different option altogether.

This is obviously something neither Apple nor Google will tolerate. And it looks like Apple is the first one to act on it. As of now, Fortnite has been taken off the App Store and is no longer available to download.

Epic has definitely invited trouble with this decision of bypassing the two stores’ systems and using their own platform to pay for it.

Also Read: Fortnite: Pros Get Competitive Warning For Teaming Accusations

Play Store next?

But was this really surprising? Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has been very vocal about the App Store and the Play Store as well. He even called out Apple for being monopolistic. Similarly, he shared his thoughts about Google, too.

To top it all off, he even mentioned how, if they avoided the 30% cut by the two stores, they could pass on the benefits to their consumers. And that is exactly what Epic did. So, this may have been the plan all along.

Now, what does this entail for Fortnite? It’s actually hard to say, considering it has over 350 million players, worldwide. Obviously, a lot of these players will be mobile users and this will seriously affect the numbers for the game. Even though there is no decision by Google (yet), we can expect something soon enough.

Things are going from bad to worse for Epic. Recently, a cheater who made it through the FNCS Semis was exposed and questions were raised about the game’s security. They really have some serious damage control do to here. The next few days will define the future of Fortnite on mobile as we wait for a response from Epic.