As the biggest game on the planet at the moment, there is little sign that Fortnite‘s popularity is slowing down any time soon, and with the game preparing to head to Android at some point in the future, one new development has shown that the game will skip one of the largest Android game distributors around.
Speaking in an interview with The Verge, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney revealed that for the upcoming Android release of Fortnite, the game will be bypassing a release through the Google Play Store for distribution, and instead Epic Games will opt to directly release the game to players through its official Fortnite website.
According to Sweeney, the specific reasonings behind the decision are that the company wishes to maintain a “direct relationship” with customers in relation to Fortnite and its available platforms. The second (and more immediate) reason behind this move is to circumvent the profits that Google would take a cut from by putting the game on its Google Play marketplace, of which Google normally takes about 30% from games distributed through its store.
Given that Epic has opted to release Fortnite through its own Epic Games Installer on PC and Mac–allowing the company to maximize the amount of profit it earns versus releasing on the App Store, PSN, Xbox Live, or Nintendo eShop–it doesn’t come as too much of a surprise that the company would seek trying to avoid releasing the game through a digital “middleman” that would take a cut of the game’s profits, especially given how lucrative the game has been over the past several months.
Fortnite is available now on PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC, Mac, and iOS, and will be coming to Android sometime this summer, though no specific release date has been revealed by Epic at this time.