This is an edited version of the editorial published in last Friday’s newsletter, for paid subscribers only.
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Remember the Digital Markets Act? I kind of forgot about it too until last week, when the European Commission hit Apple with a €500m fine for not complying with it.
Of course, Epic quickly steamed in to register its disgust with Apple’s behaviour, which always makes for good copy. And all that, in turn, reminded me that yes, the mobile Epic Games Store also still exists. So how is it doing?
Well, it is still plugging away. Epic is releasing free games every week as a way to get players through the door, but on mobile, where 99% of games are already free, is this a good idea?
Sure, giving away Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Vampire Survivors as a user acquisition tactic for the Epic Games Store on PC makes sense. But look at the last few weeks of mobile Games Store giveaways – are many people really that likely to jump through the hoops required to install the Epic Games Store just to claim a free copy of Loop Hero, Chuchel, or Bridge Constructor? I doubt it.
Epic set a goal of getting 100m installs for its mobile store by the end of 2024, but by January 2025, it had claimed under 30m. And it has been pretty quiet about its mobile store ever since.
Yes, the mobile Epic Games Store has got the biggest game on the planet as its killer app. But as it stands, it appears to be little more than a Fortnite launcher for mobile. I’d be curious to see how many downloads the other first party games, Fall Guys and Rocket League Sideswipe, are getting. It’s presumably not many, and it feels very unlikely that the few third party games on the store are moving any needles.
Clearly, Epic’s lengthy and expensive court battles with Apple and Google have been a win for the mobile game business overall. It’s just that the changes we’ve seen in the landscape haven’t really led to more and greater competition between app stores – instead, developers have been able to more explicitly push top spending players over to webshops, where they can dodge that 30% platform tax.
The vast, vast majority of players will just continue to get their games through the app stores they know and trust, until there’s a clear reason to switch over to something else.
And as has been proven time and time again, Apple and Google won’t loosen their grip unless they are directly told to by a government or competition authority – and even when they are, they often find a way to weasel out of making any meaningful changes, or are happy to just take the fine.
They’re not perfect, obviously, but for game-makers the app stores themselves were never really the core problem – it was the 30% cut. If developers can claw back some of that platform tax from its top spenders through webshops more easily than through alternative app stores, then that’s what will continue to happen. The player benefit with webshops – getting more in-game currency for their spend – is also clearer.
I’m glad Epic has been fighting for these changes. But the Fortnite maker seems to have ended up with an app store few people really want or need, when it could have just figured out a cleaner way to get players over to a Fortnite webshop without upsetting Apple and Google too much.
Maybe one day we’ll see Fortnite, complete with a robust webshop, back on the main app stores – that would be the real win for players and the companies involved. But that would mean the executives involved putting their egos aside, backing down and eating some humble pie. And that’s definitely not happening anytime soon.
