Google says Fortnite has to pay them like everyone else

Google has refused to waive their standard fee for Fortnite’s in-game purchases. According to The Verge, Epic asked Google for an exemption or reduction in their cut to have Fortnite listed on Google’s Play store for the Android platform. Google, not surprisingly, told Epic to take a hike. The tech giant pointed out that Epic apparently pays Apple the same rate to be listed on the official Apple iOS store, and that their portion of revenue is necessary to maintain their distribution and support costs. Epic says it’s high time for the industry to change.

We have asked that Google not enforce its publicly stated expectation that products distributed through Google Play use Google’s payment service for in-app purchase. We believe this form of tying of a mandatory payment service with a 30% fee is illegal in the case of a distribution platform with over 50% market share.

Fortnite is currently not available in Google’s Play store for Android platform. It has to be manually loaded onto Android tablets and phones via Epic’s store.