Fortnite maker Epic Games made a big announcement to the game’s hundreds of millions of users: It was dropping the price on V-bucks, Fortnite’s in-game currency, by 20 percent. The “Fortnite Mega Drop,” as Epic called the promotion, took effect immediately on every platform on which the wildly popular battle royale game is available — with one caveat. On iOS and Android mobile devices, you had to choose a new payment method, called “Epic direct payment,” rather than pay through the App Store or Google Play Store, in order to get the discount.
First Apple, then Google, booted Fortnite from their app stores on Thursday, just hours after the game started offering users the promotion. The move does not prevent the game’s existing users from continuing to play on those platforms, for now. But it means no one else can download Fortnite, and Epic can’t update it.
Epic, Match group & Spotify joined in protest against Apple's App Store commission, following which the EU opened two antitrust investigations against Apple, one of which intends to look into Apple’s practice taking a 30 percent cut of revenue from in-app purchases made through the App Store. Spotify claims Apple uses its App Store to stifle innovation and limit consumer choice in favor of its own Apple Music service. Rakuten, which also pushed for the investigation, alleges that it’s anti-competitive for Apple to take a 30 percent commission on ebooks sold through the App Store while promoting its own Apple Books service.
Smaller app developers have also expressed their concerns over Apple’s practices. David Heinemeier Hansson, the CTO of Basecamp and the new Hey email service, called Apple “gangsters” because it rejected a bug fix update and asked the company in a phone call to commit to adding an in-app subscription to prevent it from being removed.
Will this Epic Vs apple Battle bring about a much needed change how these tech behemoths function.