Epic Games does not play around when it comes to their in-game revenues and microtransactions. The company has a historic lawsuit against the tech giant Apple, which, although still ongoing, has achieved many milestones for game developers. Epic Games continues its trend of standing up against companies with its lawsuit against Google.
This lawsuit started after Epic Games decided to add in-app purchases to the Android version of Fortnite, which avoided Google’s 30% revenue share at the time. Following this, Google banned the game from their widely used PlayStore, which led to them getting sued by Epic Games.
During the case’s jury trial proceedings, Google Play Apps and Games Vice President Purnima Kochikar gave his testimony on the third day of hearings. As reported by The Verge, he revealed that Google offered Epic Games a hefty $147 million just to keep Fortnite on the Play Store. This was around the time when Epic Games was just releasing the game on select Android devices through its website back in 2018.
Kochikar continued with more details, saying that Google was ready to pay this large sum of money to developers of the popular Battle Royale game in increments over a time of 3 years, which was supposed to end in 2021.
Epic Games Releases Fortnite On PlayStore Anyways
Two years after rejecting this offer from Google, Epic Games decided they wanted to release Fortnite on PlayStore in 2020. They claim it was done after Google strong-armed them by mentioning all the warnings players would receive when they downloaded the game’s APK directly from the Epic Games website.
However, it only took Epic Games four months to start avoiding paying Google’s 30% cut, resulting in the game getting banned from PlayStore. Another document also revealed that Google also considered buying Epic Games outright because it posed to their business model. This was because Epic Games' move was a “contagion risk” in case other companies decided to follow the company's lead and take their applications off the Play Store.
The suit is still ongoing, and as time goes on, we will see who comes out on top of this. In the meantime, Fortnite on Android can be downloaded through the official Epic Games application.
