Fortnite’s availability for Android is just around the corner, but fans won’t be finding the game on the Google Play Store. Why you ask? Because Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, announced that the game would be available exclusively through the Fortnite website.
According to Sweeney, players who wish to play the game on their Android devices will need to visit the official page and download the Fortnite launcher, which will then allow them to install and load the game directly from their Android device.
The primary reason behind Sweeney’s decision not to make Fortnite available via the Play Store is mostly a financial one; developers who wish to make their apps available via Google’s Play Store are required to pay a 30% distribution fee for every in-app purchase made.
Sweeney also says that avoiding the fee has always been a major part of his company’s motivation, and that the fee was “disproportionate to the cost of services these stores perform, such as payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service.”
The idea of straying away from a established app platform such as the Play Store isn’t exactly new, but Sweeney hopes that his decision to bypass the platform will restart a movement of developers and app users to the idea of installing an app directly to the phone without a proxy.
Epic Games first introduced Fortnite to the mobile ecosystem via the iOS. Months later, the company released the game on the Nintendo Switch portable console. As mentioned at the start of this article, Android is the next ecosystem in line that will be receiving access to the game.
(Source: Fortune, TechCrunch)
