The 3 takeaways from Epic Games’ battle to open up mobile storefronts

In 2020, Epic Games — developers of Fortnite and the Unreal Engine that powers a significant number modern video games — declared war on both Apple and Google’s mobile storefronts. Epic wanted to challenge the idea of significant passive revenue percentages, specifically the way Apple and Google collect a percentage of all transactions made on their platforms. Epic, who was making quite a bit of money on Fortnite in 2020, took exception to this.

Four years later, Epic has won some battles and lost others, but has successfully pushed both companies to make concessions they had not expected to make. These app stores combined were worth $124 billion 2023, according to Sensor Tower, so any changes made to them have great ripple effects across the mobile game development industry. Here’s three big takeaways for developers figuring out what this means for them.