Epic Games is launching the Free Fortnite Cup. Guess who the villain is?
Epic Games launched the Free Fortnite Cup with Apple as the villain.
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Epic loses court bid to force Apple to reinstate Fortnite in the App Store

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 4 min

A federal judge denied Epic Games’ request to force Apple to reinstate Fortnite on the App Store pending the results of an antitrust lawsuit. U.S. District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers also ruled in favor of Epic, permanently granting a prior temporary order that stops Apple from retaliating against Epic by removing support for Epic’s Unreal Engine.

The antitrust battle kicked off August 13, when Epic announced a discount policy and direct payment mechanism for Fortnite that Apple and Google claimed violated their respective terms of service. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has long argued against big companies taking a 30% commission of every game transaction and said Epic should be able to sell its in-app goods directly to players for less. Epic only charges a 12% developer fee in its store.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.