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Citing 'Economic Efficiency,' Epic Says Fortnite's Upcoming Android App Won't Hit Google Play Store (theverge.com)
Fortnite developer Epic Games will not be distributing its massively popular game on Android because the Play Store takes a 30 percent cut of the revenue. Instead, the company plans to distribute the software to players via the official Fornite website, "where Android users can download a Fortnite Installer program to install the game on compatible devices," reports The Verge. From the report: For Fortnite on iOS, Epic decided to distribute the game on the App Store, most likely because it had no other method of getting iPhone users to easily download the software. (Apple, unlike Google, does not allow iOS users to download apps that are not first approved by its internal review processes and distributed through its proprietary marketplace.) With Google and its more open platform, Epic can get away with distributing the app itself. CEO Tim Sweeney says the primary motivation here is twofold. Epic wants to maintain its direct relationship with consumers. (The company currently distributes Fortnite on PC through its own Epic Games Launcher, instead of using Valve's popular Steam platform.)
The second reason is financial: Epic does not want to pay Google's 30 percent cut, especially considering the entire game is funded through in-app purchases. "The 30 percent store tax is a high cost in a world where game developers' 70 percent must cover all the cost of developing, operating, and supporting their games," Sweeney says. "There's a rationale for this on console where there's enormous investment in hardware, often sold below cost, and marketing campaigns in broad partnership with publishers." But on mobile platforms that are open, like Android, "30 percent is disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform, such as payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service," he says. Sweeney adds that Epic is "intimately familiar with these costs" from its direct distribution of Fortnite on Mac and PC. There's no word as to when the Android version of Fortnite will be available, but rumors suggest it will be tied to the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Note 9 launch on August 9th.
The second reason is financial: Epic does not want to pay Google's 30 percent cut, especially considering the entire game is funded through in-app purchases. "The 30 percent store tax is a high cost in a world where game developers' 70 percent must cover all the cost of developing, operating, and supporting their games," Sweeney says. "There's a rationale for this on console where there's enormous investment in hardware, often sold below cost, and marketing campaigns in broad partnership with publishers." But on mobile platforms that are open, like Android, "30 percent is disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform, such as payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service," he says. Sweeney adds that Epic is "intimately familiar with these costs" from its direct distribution of Fortnite on Mac and PC. There's no word as to when the Android version of Fortnite will be available, but rumors suggest it will be tied to the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Note 9 launch on August 9th.
I would rather have that money go to Epic (who actually built the game) than to Google (who is just doing some web hosting).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I completely get why Epic wants to do this: 30% adds up to a lot of money for a game that pulls in hundreds of millions a month. But for the broader Android user base this is a terrible idea.
Having the ability to install external APKs and actually enticing non-technical users to do it are two different things. The average smartphone user isn't prepared to use external sources, and if they do, it's going to end up like malware on Windows. Which is to say there's going to be trojan APKs left and right pretending to be Fortnite, or Fortnite with hacks, etc.
Fortnite's original game mode - Save The World - was a zombie survival game. If users have to install APKs from unknown sources, we're going to be surviving a whole new kind of zombie outbreak...
Google was recently fined Billions by the EU for a supposedly closed system (eg requiring Google Play on all Android devices), yet Apple gets away with a far more closed system. Stupidity knows no bounds
Encouraging people to download software from even less secure sites is NOT a win even if one of the corporate cancers is able to get a bit more profit.
The Fortnite website is not "less secure" than the Google play store. One of those has been found with malware.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
30% is a fair market price for the service provided. The service in question is access to a vast marketplace (..)
What's Google's cut for then? Download bandwidth: peanuts. Promotion? Sure, but for a game like Fortnite that will go through many channels of which Google Play is only one. Perhaps not even an important one. Customer support? Surely for a game like Fortnite, Epic's job will go way beyond what Google provides in that area. Malware checks? A non-feature for a big-name trusted source like Epic.
Being a longtime game developer and distributor, Epic knows what these costs are. They've done the math, and found that Google's cut is much higher than their service is worth. At that point it's only logical to look for a way around it. For a small Indie developer that may work out differently, but Epic isn't one of those.
Okay it's not user friendly install-wise. But at least Epic will be left with more $$ to put into their next projects. Win-win for Epic & their users alike.
Sideloading could become more difficult in future official Android builds as a response to this...but hopefully Google will choose the high road.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
this precedent will inevitably lead to kids side-installing malware to get their games.
Why don't you think of the children? That is an emotional appeal. Just like arguing that violent video games will lead children into a life of violence.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Sweet, and Google better try to understand the message before it gets busted up for the same reason that Apple is getting busted
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Mostly I think you failed to understand my point, but I am quite willing to accept your premise that the Fortnite website itself is as secure as the Google Play website. It does NOT change my point unless you insist that EVERY website with apps to be downloaded is secure.
However, I disagree with you regarding your claim that Fortnite has no malware. Absence of evidence is not proof of absence. You can't prove any negative.
I also note that you ignored the more serious problems mentioned by my comment nor did you offer any trace of a solution for anything. Oh, wait. Just par for today's Slashdot. Mostly I miss the wit and humor that used to be found in the odd corners of Slashdot.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
However, I disagree with you regarding your claim that Fortnite has no malware. Absence of evidence is not proof of absence. You can't prove any negative.
I don't think you disagree with my point. I said "One of those has been found with malware."
I also note that you ignored the more serious problems mentioned by my comment nor did you offer any trace of a solution for anything. Oh, wait. Just par for today's Slashdot. [On the bigger religious problem, "There is no gawd but profit, and Apple is gawd's #1 prophet", I think the best solution approach would be a pro-freedom anti-greedom tax system]
I have no solution for this. The solution is love for and from all mankind?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Excellent example of how the insane greed of the corporate cancers is bad for the human peasants caught in the crossfire.
It's an excellent example of how monopolies begin to crack under the weight of their own largesse.
NOT to suggest that the Google Play website properly vets the security of the apps, but it's better than nothing.
No absolutely not. It's much worse than nothing. The existence of the app store is a potent source of perverse market incentive fueling the creation of malware.
It is a win because if successful it shows the corporate cancer known as google they need to adopt a more reasonable stance or they can be worked around.
While it seems we are largely in agreement on the problems, you seem to have nothing resembling a solution or any constructive improvements for mine. A "problem" with no solution is just part of reality. If you can't fix it, then you better learn to enjoy living with it.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
And meanwhile the rest of us will continue to be caught in the crossfire.
However, I actually disagree with you. Cancers are not planning so far ahead. They are only trying to swallow each other and the last cancer standing gets to kill the host. In this case, our society.
I'm increasingly convinced the resolution of the Fermi Paradox is human extinction.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Same audience that is playing Fortnite today. Children who have no access to a better device at the moment of playing it. For example, during recess in school.
Ad-ridden, crypto-mining fake fortnite installers have been a thing on play store for a while, dear pro-monopoly zealot.
look at this guy, getting mad at someone for trying to make money in america. are you not from around here?
"NOT to suggest that the Google Play website properly vets the security of the apps"
99% of the apps on the Play Store are spyware. That is unsurprising given that Google's whole business model is based on data rape.
It'd be interesting if Epic returned a third of their extra Android revenue to users by discounting in-app purchases by 10% on the Android version. I don't think this would lead to a general reduction in the Apple Tax, but it could lead to a special deal between Eplc and Apple for a 20% rather than a 30% App Store cut.
That word doesn't mean what you think it does.
In fact, the sentence almost says the opposite of what you intended.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Fornite? (LIne 2). Sounds like a heat-resistant mineral.
Can't BeauH1-B even copy and paste correctly?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
But now you'll have the official source telling dummies to enable the unknown sources option. So when some asshole finds a "cracked free fornite all dlc for free" APK on the internet, they can google "should I enable unknown sources for fortnite" and the official webpage will make it clear that they must.
So the TL;DR version is "Go walled gardens fuck yeah." well remember that when Windows and Mac go store-only and boot locking kills Linux/AOSP. Because that's what you want, you buy a device from $vendor and they control what you can run on it. It's probably where we're going but I wouldn't be cheering on that development...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I would like to see them. Please.
Google cannot manually check every new submission to Google Play and their automatic systems sometimes misses malware. It's not perfect however they remove such bad apps by dozens of thousands every month and they also remotely wipe such apps from your phone. Everyone's more or less happy. However once you enable "Unknown Sources" Google can rightfully wash their hands of it. You're on your own. Fucked or not.
Also, just also, stop using the Internet altogether. There are ad networks which allow to use JavaScript and you receive a crypto miner along with some shady ads, and there are thousands of websites which make your end device mine for them. It must be Google's fault as well, right? All due to their "monopoly", right?
P.S. I still cannot figure out which part of our lives Google have monopolized but the EU vehemently disagrees.
Epic's website maybe not. but you do realize that Fortnite for Android has already been out for over a month now right?
Oh wait, those are FAKE Fortnite apps, installed via... the same way as the real Fortnite app.
You may note that none of those apps are on Google Play. And what else is not on Google Play?
I can only imagine there will be a new round of Fortnite phishing apps to steal account credentials along with payment information.
All I can say is you know what the headlines are going to say soon with people installing all the fake versions and Apple will flatly point to those when Epic comes around asking Apple to get rid of the 30%. (Which is apparently making quite a lot of money for Epic - something like $2M a day comes solely from the iOS version).
Epic might have inadvertently poisoned the well on this one if all the headlines are about how to avoid getting the wrong version of Fortnite.
But Fortnite players seems unhealthily obsessed with the game. I saw something in the past week about this being the most profitable game at the moment, taking up something around 7% of the entire digital market's spending?
So I imagine Fortnite players would have no problem doing anything to keep the game on them even more. I saw an image recently of a guy who had taken his computer and monitor onto a train/bus/whatever so he could play Fortnite the entire time.
It sounds like you are dreaming about how much better Apple iPhones are. Dream on friend, dream on.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Play Store manages security updates and holds my payment info. Not going to give up on those features for a game, so they lose a customer here.
If Fortnite scale is so large, then they should be able to negotiate a better deal with Google.
... walled gardens and locking down games accusing google of unfair practices. That is rich.
Type in www.epic.com to get the apk - half of those things you pulled out of your bum are irrelevant and unnecessary.
It's easy to tell you don't know the topic you;re talking about. The game in question is free. There is no credit card processing required to get the APK.
"Malware authors already have dozens of copies of malicious Fortnite software in the wild."
And? So what? There could be a thousand virus ridden copies of photoshop on piratebay too but who gives a crap if you are not getting it from there and youre getting it from the devs website.
The only valid concern you can have about Epic's website is it could be pwned, but you would have to be a fool to think the google play store is impervious from being pwned too. And where do you think the play store gets its APK from?
No, I'm not ;-)
If you don't log into your Google account then Google Play won't check your apps and certainly won't delete the apps installed from unknown sources.
Cheers!
You must be a bit slow on the uptake, Ivan. I'm pretty sure I've explained it to you once.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I would really love to see some app store competition. This 30% take on everything is ridiculous. If the big app stores would charge a flat fee, or cap their take at a certain dollar amount, much more quality software would show up on the app stores, instead of just rinky-dink cheap and free apps. If there were app store competition, we'd have a lot better choices.
That word doesn't mean what you think it does.
In fact, the sentence almost says the opposite of what you intended.
Intent was to convey sloppiness rather generosity. Monopolies can afford to be lazy and sloppy with allocation of resources. A company held to the fire of a functioning market is forced to work for it while remaining frugal or die.
While it seems we are largely in agreement on the problems, you seem to have nothing resembling a solution or any constructive improvements for mine. A "problem" with no solution is just part of reality. If you can't fix it, then you better learn to enjoy living with it.
I don't use app stores. Never have, never will. I don't have Google app store/play services installed on my phone.
It is sufficient to provide users with tools to manage and transform trust. Monopoly dictation of standards from up high by those who claim to "know better" is dangerous and counterproductive to society.
Users should have the ability to configure systems to visit only approved sites or run approved software by any authorities user deems to be trustworthy.
Users should have the ability to configure systems to visit any site yet be warned of sites or software known to authorities to be harmful.
Users should have the ability to visit any site or run any software with themselves being the exclusive judge of trustworthiness.
The problem of judging trustworthiness is as old as civilization. The Internet sucks so hard at it because analogous tools to manage trust suck or don't exist. There will always be risk beyond which efforts to mitigate are deleterious.
Beyond trust there are two critical problems with Android OS that must be resolved:
1. Fundamental design defects enabling parade of privilege escalation vulnerabilities and other effective isolation gaps.
2. Android must not be intentionally engineered to be hostile to the end user's interests. Take it or leave it demands of users by applications carries unacceptably deleterious consequences.
Denying access to contacts, messaging history, location, networks, storage and other resources must be able to be achieved secretly without applications having the means of understanding access was denied.
This is something Google explicitly refuses to do in order to protect its interests in exchange for significant unnecessary peril borne by end users.
Thank you for attempting to clarify your position. Unfortunately, it appears that you are a Libertarian, but one of sufficient sophistication not to identify yourself as such. Under that theory of interpretation, you have already discovered that Libertarian "philosophy" is badly broken and therefore avoid the tag. Again, under that hypothesis, I would say the problem is that Libertarians don't actually understand freedom and there was quite a bit of evidence of such confusion in your reply. I actually consider it is possible that the negative mods are additional evidence from the negative mods. I would regard it as an absolute refutation of your position if those mods actually came from your own sock puppet identities. (That is not an accusation, just a hypothesis that would probably be difficult to test (if you have the skill to hide them). There are other hypotheses, too, though mostly I regard negative mods as a metric of the brokenness of Slashdot's moderation system.)
Or maybe it's just that you didn't or even can't understand my original comment on this story, the main suggestion contained in it, or the underlying philosophy as encapsulated in my sig?
Three substantive reactions to your latest long comment:
(1) Still nothing that I could recognize as a constructive approach towards a solution, just a lot of angry criticism.
(2) Your philosophic fixation is crippling your ability to use your hardware tools. The only ways this would not be true would be if you are either such a stellar programmer that you can create every software tool you want or if you personally know and trust such programmers who provide you with the tools.
(3) You again ignored my primary solution, which would be for the google to provide more of the financial information that would increase the "meaningful" aspect of the choices of which Android apps to freely choose.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
What part about "now I have to verify TLS certs, owners, UTF8 charactors" are you not understanding?
This bullshit where every individual provider has their own way of doing shit is why end-users just click "Yes, please get me through this bullshit security nonsense" and don't verify this. When I'm downloading shit for my phone, I'm on a mobile browser and far less likely to want to go through bullshit of verifying all this crap. If you don't care about security or don't care about your time, then go ahead and use any store you want.
I personally don't have time to waste on companies that are giving me more work so that they can earn more money.