It’s barely been 48 hours since Apple announced its decision to loosen restrictions on its App Store, and Epic Games has, unsurprisingly, announced that it will be launching a mobile version of its game store on iOS. More importantly, though, the Unreal Engine owner also said that it is officially bringing Fortnite to the OS.
As a quick primer on that last point, Fortnite was banned from Apple’s App Store back in 2020, after the game’s parent company, Epic Games and its founder Tim Sweeney made the unilateral decision to try and launch its own direct payment plan for Fortnite, as an alternative the App Store. Again, this unsurprisingly led to the fruit company taking swift and stern action, removing the game from its store and shortly after that, Epic filed a lawsuit that continued on up until recently.
📣 Fortnite is coming back to iOS in Europe this year! 📣
Via our soon to launch @EpicGames Store for iOS thanks to new rules in Europe via the new Digital Markets Act (DMA), stay tuned for more details. https://t.co/7nOa2lcdhN
— Epic Games Store (@EpicGames) January 25, 2024
That feud ended, by the by, with a US District Court Judge ordering both Apple and Epic Games to have settlement talks, a thought that, once again, surprisingly never occurred between both parties.
The feud notwithstanding, Epic Games still hasn’t shared a lot of detail about how it plans on bringing both the new store on to iOS, or Fortnite back on to it. It officially X, formerly Twitter account simply states that it will launch “later this year”. Oh, and on that note, before some of you get too excited, the game will make its return on iOS for the European market first, seeing how the loosening of restrictions was made in part due to laws within the EU.
On that note, Apple still retains some oversight of 3rd party app stores, so it is possible that the company from Cupertino could still give Epic Games flak over its implementation of its store, in one form or another. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see how this plays out.
(Source: The Verge)
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