Fortnite will return to the U.S. iOS App Store and iPhones next week after a significant court ruling, Epic boss Tim Sweeney has said.
Yesterday, April 30, a U.S. Federal District Court in California found that Apple wilfully violated a court order in the Epic Games v. Apple case that required Apple to enable developers to offer their customers alternative ways to make purchases outside apps.
In a tweet, Sweeney put forward a “peace proposal” to Apple, which Epic has battled against in the courts for years now. “If Apple extends the court’s friction-free, Apple-tax-free framework worldwide, we’ll return Fortnite to the App Store worldwide and drop current and future litigation on the topic,” Sweeney said.
In January, IGN reported on how Sweeney had spent billions of dollars fighting Apple and Google over the way the companies run their app stores. Sweeney told IGN at the time that he considered it a long-term investment in Epic and Fortnite’s future, insisting Epic could afford to keep up the fight for decades to come.
Sweeney’s ongoing battle to get Fortnite back on iPhones and Android phones while avoiding paying store fees is well-documented. The gist is this: Epic doesn’t want to pay the now standard 30% store fees on revenue made on mobile games. Instead, it wants to run the likes of Fortnite through its own mobile store, the Epic Games Store, without Apple and Google getting in the way and gobbling up its profit. Back in 2020, this dispute ended up with Fortnite blocked from release on iOS.
Now, in the U.S., nearly five years later Fortnite is finally set to return.
In another tweet, Sweeney hailed the court ruling: “NO FEES on web transactions. Game over for the Apple Tax.
“Apple’s 15-30% junk fees are now just as dead here in the United States of America as they are in Europe under the Digital Markets Act. Unlawful here, unlawful there.”
Apple will now be referred to federal prosecutors for violating the U.S. court order. “Apple’s continued attempts to interfere with competition will not be tolerated,” U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said. “This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order.”
Gonzalez Rogers referred Apple and one of its executives, Alex Roman, vice president of finance, to federal prosecutors for a criminal contempt investigation into their conduct in the case. Roman gave testimony about the steps Apple took to comply with her injunction that was “replete with misdirection and outright lies,” the judge wrote.
Apple in a statement said “we strongly disagree with the decision. We will comply with the court’s order and we will appeal.”
After multiple costly legal battles Epic has now made significant progress; prior to this point its victories were mostly limited to Europe via the region’s Digital Markets Act.
In August last year, the Epic Games Store launched on iPhones in the European Union and on Android devices worldwide with Fortnite, Rocket League Sideswipe, and Fall Guys for mobile. But actually getting the likes of Fortnite up and running on mobile is a nightmare, with various “scare screens” putting up to 50% of users off, according to Epic.
Throughout the spending, Epic has suffered significant layoffs. In September 2023, the North Carolina studio saw 830 employees, or about 16% of its workforce, lose their jobs. In October last year, Sweeney insisted the company was now “financially sound,” with Fortnite and the Epic Games Store both hitting new records in “concurrency and success.”
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
