The folks behind Fortnite seem to love the legal system. After starting a fight with Apple more than three years ago, Epic Games is now taking on Google over their decision to remove Fortnite from the Google Play store following Epic’s attempts to circumvent the store’s payment system.
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For those entirely unfamiliar with this saga, allow us to give you a quick recap. In 2020, Epic Games updated the mobile version of Fortnite to allow players to purchase V-Bucks directly in-game. This was in an attempt to make the prices on V-Bucks cheaper, as Google takes a 30% cut of any transactions completed on their platform. In response to this update, Google removed Fortnite from the Google Play store entirely.
Shortly thereafter, Epic Games filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, claiming that Google’s practices were not consumer-friendly and that they actively prevented healthy competition. Google responded with a countersuit claiming that Epic had breached its contract with the Google Play store.
The trial has been a long time coming, largely due to Epic being preoccupied in court against Apple for the same reasons. That case ended mostly unwell for them, as Apple won on nine out of ten counts. Since then, Fortnite has yet to return to either the App Store or the Google Play store, but that could always change if this case against Google swings the way Epic wants it to.
According to a report from Seeking Alpha, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney is expected to testify, as well as Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The case begins this morning, and while Epic is not looking for any sort of compensation, they are hoping to force Google to change their store policies. This trial is sure to be in the news for a good while, so we’ll be sure to keep our readers posted on anything significant that comes from it.
In other news, Epic’s likely to fund their legal efforts with all the revenue they’re making from the nearly 45 million players enjoying the Fortnite OG season. You can read about those numbers and Epic’s response to the immense player count here.
Source: Seeking Alpha