The American company Apple and Google had taken an unprecedented move of removing the famous gaming app Fortnite from the App Store and Google Play Store for allegedly violating their in-app payments policies.
This sudden move has caused a brawl between the tech giants and Epic Games, the developer of Fortnite, and later filed an anti-trust lawsuit against these American companies calling their payment policies “anti-competitive”.
According to a Sensor Tower report, there are over 350 million users of Fortnite across the globe. So the decision of removing the game from both the Play Store and App Store will mostly create huge losses for the game developer. So here are the five key points of this story that everyone should know.
The American video game, Epic Games had recently launched a new update for Fortnite in which the players are allowed to pay directly to Epic for the in-app purchases related to the game. However, this is not how it works because the payment policies say that both Apple and Google should get a 30% share from the funds made through in-app purchases.
Apple was first to take action against Epic Games from breaking their payment policies and had removed the popular game Fortnite from the App Store. Soon even, Google broke its silence and removed Fortnite from Play Store for violating Google’s billing policies.
Apple in its statement said, “Epic enabled a feature in its app which was not reviewed or approved by Apple, and they did so with the express intent of violating the App Store guidelines regarding in-app payments that apply to every developer who sells digital goods or services.”
Soon Google also spoke upon violation of its policies but they are also ready to discuss with Epic Games to bring the gaming app back. According to the search giant, the app is only not available on Play Store but the users can download it from other Android platforms which include Samsung Galaxy Store for Samsung users and the Epic Games app for others.
