By Supantha Mukherjee
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Multiplayer shooter game Fortnite is back on iPhones in the European Union and on Google’s Android devices worldwide after a four-year hiatus following legal action by the EU, developer Epic Games said on Friday.
Developed by US studio Epic and backed by Chinese company Tencent, the world’s largest games studio, Fortnite launched in 2017 and became an instant hit with its last-player-standing “Battle Royale” format, attracting millions of enthusiastic players.
But in August 2020, Apple and Alphabet’s Google removed Fortnite from their app stores because the company violated its policies by introducing a payments feature. This led to several lawsuits against the company’s rules against charging up to 30% commission on payments.
At the time of the ban, Epic had 116 million users on the Apple platform alone.
The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) allows Epic to open its games store in the EU, but Apple continues to block users outside Europe from accessing Fortnite and its games store, the company said.
“We are really grateful to the European Commission for not only passing the DMA and allowing competition between stores, but also stepping in and putting strong pressure on Apple and Google to make sure they can’t just hamper competition,” Epic CEO Tim Sweeney told reporters.
“They have made great efforts to slow us down and have tried several times to stop us. And the European Commission has always intervened and made sure that competitors could enter the market,” he said.
The store launches with Fortnite, Rocket League Sideswipe, and the brand new Fall Guys for mobile, and Epic is working with other developers to publish their games and apps through its store.
Epic, which has 75 million monthly active users on its PC store, expects to add 100 million new mobile users by the end of the year.
The games would also be available through independent mobile stores such as AltStore.
However, according to Epic, the installation process is lengthy and involves 15 steps, confusing device settings, and scary screens on iOS devices.
Apple said that in making the new features available to developers in the EU, it is working to make them as easy as possible for users while protecting their privacy and security.
“We probably lost over a billion dollars in revenue because we didn’t have access to the global iOS customer base for four years, but what is the price of freedom?” Sweeney said.
(Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee; Editing by David Holmes)
