Still from Epic Games’s “1984” video about Apple — image source: Epic Games
Epic Games chief Tim Sweeney complains that “Fortnite” should not have been off the App Store for so long, ignoring the fact that he willfully violated Apple’s terms of service.
Back in 2020, Apple removed Fortnite from the App Store, while makers Epic Games cried foul and made out that this was big brother-style interference, done with no notice or warning. It was soon revealed that Epic Games had not only knowingly violated its App Store contracts, but had also spent months planning the violation, the protest, and its accompany video.
Subsequently, Apple won every scintilla of its legal case against Epic Games, bar one concerning anti-steering. And Apple managed to mishandle that one loss that the company was ultimately forced to allow the game back onto the App Store.
“I had actually hoped that we would get an injunction against Apple blocking Fortnite and that we’d only be off for a few weeks,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney told The Verge in a new interview. “But the court process dragged out, and we were off for five years.”
Sweeney has previously claimed that, including lost profits, its choice to fight Apple over payment systems cost it $1 billion. Now Epic Games plans to make the most of being back on the iPhone, as Sweeney says that “all future growth of Fortnite will primarily be on mobile.”
In the same interview, the games developer’s executive vice president Saxs Persson, echoes this, and implies that beating Apple means they can now develop Fortnite further.
The iOS version of the game is now “part of everybody’s life” at the company, says Persson, and the developers have a “real-world feel” for what they want to do with it next. “The doors are open now, and we can actually go and every day make the game better,” he continued.
Sweeney says that since the company was allowed to offer alternative payment systems, 40% of users have chosen to use it. Some 60% have stayed with Apple’s in-app payment processing, and he says that’s because they already had accounts there instead of with Epic Games.
“As we get more players to associate payment methods with their Epic accounts,” he said, “we’ll see a higher rate of adoption, and I would hope that it would be above 50%.”
The return of Fortnite to the App Store is part of a series of orders Apple has been required to follow after a ruling from Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. They all concern this issue of anti-steering, the business of denying developers the ability to communicate alternative offers to users.