Hacker News Reader

Comment by Skunkleton | Hacker News Reader

I can't imagine that 100% of the people interested in fortnite for android are willing to sideload the apk. I would be surprised if this wasn't having a net-negative impact on the total number of android users. I wonder if this is just to avoid paying a percentage on in-app purchases? What else could it be?

View on HN

Epic, well Tim Sweeney, bemoaned Microsoft for pushing to get developers to release apps/games within their store. I think Epic feels, and probably rightly so, that they can go the direct route and come out okay.

And if they judged incorrectly, they can always distribute it in the store later. Much easier to add it to Google Play than remove it from Google Play from a PR standpoint.

I'm sure Epic doesn't mind given their savings of staying out of Google Play.

1) It's hard to overstate how much people love Fortnite. They can also lose ~25% of sales and still make the money without the cut. 2) It's not necessarily about the money, there's lots of other rules besides the 30% cut that might be the actual sticking point.

It will be available on samsung galaxy apps store, so for all Samsung users (quite a lot) no need to side install an apk.

Probably less discoverable there than on Fortnite's website to be honest.

> I can't imagine that 100% of the people interested in fortnite for android are willing to sideload the apk.

As long as more than 70% are, it's a net gain for Epic.

If they can then leverage this to be a secondary app store that they get a cut (smaller than Google's cut to encourage people to use it), then they can come out making far more money even if they lose more than 30% of installs by doing this.

If they lose less than 30% of their installs, but are making 30% more on each IAP, they're rolling profit. Bear in mind, most users won't even buy stuff, so the question is... will they lose a lot of paying customers, and my guess for that is no.

Also, Tim Sweeney is an outspoken critic of the app store model, so it's unsurprising to see Epic go this way where they can.

sounds like he's a hypocrite also, as his game is on IOS and even available there first.

I wouldn't call that hypocritical. He can hate the model because of his first hand experience with it. He'd also be a fool to turn down the iOS market.

He's the CEO of a major company, he presumably can't let his personal views lead him to not be part of iOS. But his board/investors can probably be reasonably sold on the idea of saving the 30% margin Google takes... and also aligns well with his ideals.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com