Fortnite is the biggest mobile release since PUBG or Pokemon GO, but as of August 10th, you won’t find it from Google. Don't believe me? Fine. Open up your mobile Play Store app, enter in the title or any variation thereof, and you’ll get this message:
Fortnite Battle Royal by Epic Games, Inc is not available on Google Play.
Yes, Google misspelled the title as “Royal” instead of “Royale.” A developer’s taunt, perhaps? Below the title listed as unavailable, they do list the developer account for Epic Games (with one other game listed, Battle Breakers, which isn’t available yet). Even if you misspell it, you’ll still get the customized results, so Google is probably getting a huge amount of searches for it.
Avoiding distributing their game through Google Play means that Epic Games will get to pocket all of the revenue from in-app purchases and the like, instead of paying 30% of it like most developers do. Usually that’s something a company will bite the bullet on in order to distribute their game to a wider audience, but since Epic is sitting on the most popular game in the world, maybe they’re wise to take their chances.
A friend of mine teaches high school, and he tells me the kids talk about the game constantly, and are endlessly strategizing while they should be paying attention or studying, so the game seems to still be on the rise with the kids. It probably won’t make much difference in sales where they have to download it from, so long as its popularity keeps up. If it starts to dwindle, the extra steps required to download and update the game from a less-automated source like Google might be somewhat discouraging in the long run, at which point the company may cave and throw it into the great cloud to salvage that cash flow.
Time will tell, but in the meantime, get your Fortnite elsewhere.
HHH