In 2018, the platforms have the power. Which means if you aren’t Apple, Google, or Facebook, you answer to them. That’s true for advertisers, for publishers, and even for our democracy. And it can make for a pretty bleak outlook on our future. But this year, one company struck back–and won–in what I’ve come to categorize as the most important, overlooked business story of the year.
When Epic, makers of the mega-successful game Fortnite, brought their game to the 2 billion Android phones in the world, it made a bold decision to circumvent Google Play (that’s Google’s app store, to my iOS friends in the house). Instead, Epic publicized a workaround hiding in Android, then put their game on a website, and told people to download it there.
And by golly, it worked.
It was a big gamble. The way app stores work to date is, Apple or Google hosts (and hopefully promotes!) your app, and for every sale, they get 30¢ on the dollar. That counts for both the app itself and any in-app purchases. Apple had already collected an estimated $54 million for the iOS release of Fortnite.
There’s no avoiding this Apple tax as a developer on iOS. And almost every significant Android app pays the equivalent tax to Google. However, Google has built a feature in your phone’s settings that allows you to install software without the oversight or quality control of the Play Store. It’s both risky to activate, and a pain. Through its install process, Fortnite asks that you grant deep permissions on your phone to allow installation outside of Google Play. Android counters with all sorts of (fair!) warning screens. Once you open these floodgates, malware has more channels to set up shop on your device with impunity, until you close them.
Those hurdles didn’t stop Fortnite’s voracious fanbase, though. Within three weeks, the game had 15 million downloads on Android. Google seemed passive-aggressively sore about all the lost revenue: Within a week of the game’s release, its researchers disclosed a flaw in Fortnite that could allow the phone to download and run malicious software without a user knowing. Epic quickly patched the app. But if fans cared about the error, they didn’t show it.
Epic does not break out its active player counts on platforms like Android, and declined to share specifics for this article. But Fortnite does have more than 200 million players across systems. Epic tells me that players are very likely to play the game across multiple platforms.