Epic Games vs. Apple: What Happened and Why

Index

What happened The problem of Apple payments and video games: a complicated relationship Considerations and possible developments This year's mid-August grilling was accompanied by a heated debate, resulting from Apple's decision to remove Fortnite from the App Store resulting in players being unable to install the game on iPhone and iPad. An act that made a huge noise, inevitable if we consider the popularity that the battle royale game has reached within the videogame landscape. The latest official figures speak of 350 million registered accounts, certainly not all active, but able to accumulate an endless amount of hours of play between the various home and mobile platforms for which Fortnite is available. In the month of April 2020 alone, just to give a dimension to the phenomenon that has become this title, players have spent a total of 3.2 billion hours inside.

Although it is in effect a free to play, Fortnite has become over time a goose that lays golden eggs for Epic Games thanks to the purchases that can be made in the store in the game. And it is here that the series of back and forth was born that involved the developers of Fortnite and Apple, without forgetting the involvement of Google completely similar to that of the Cupertino company. After the first part of the storm, we take advantage of the moment of relative calm to take stock of what has happened in recent days, finally trying to imagine where the situation will go.