Epic Games Finally Puts Fortnite on the Google Play Store

If there’s one tragedy greater than the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s when giant multi-billion dollar companies make slightly less money. So let’s get ready to press “f” and pay our respects to Epic Games, who has apparently given up in their years-long struggle against Google and has begrudgingly put Fortnite on the Google Play Store.

Here’s the stupid history of this stupid conflict: Once Fortnite made it big, Epic Games wanted to put it on as many platforms as possible, including Android. The problem was that if you put anything on Google Play, Google takes a 30 percent cut of all profit the app makes, which is much too high as far as Epic is concerned. They applied for the super-special “we’re rich” exception, Google shot them down, so they offered their Android app off the Google Play store, allowing hackers and scammers to make their own “Fortnite” apps on the Google Play store.

This has been going on for a year and a half now, but no longer: just earlier this week, Epic Games threw in the towel, and have officially put Fortnite on the Google Play store with the full 30 percent cut of sales, although they‘ve certainly not been shy about complaining about it.

Here they are, whining to Polygon:

"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.

Because of this, we’ve launched Fortnite for Android on the Google Play Store. We’ll continue to operate the Epic Games App and Fortnite outside of Google Play, too. We hope that Google will revise its policies and business dealings in the near future, so that all developers are free to reach and engage in commerce with customers on Android and in the Play Store through open services, including payment services, that can compete on a level playing field."

So yeah. Now Epic Games might make slightly less money than they might have otherwise. Go ahead and launch that 21-F salute now, boys.