Pattern Matching

How Fortnite Baited Apple Into a Losing Battle

Epic Games’ ambush shows how antitrust scrutiny has changed the app store landscape

Welcome back to Pattern Matching, OneZero’s weekly newsletter that puts the week’s most compelling tech stories in context.

On Thursday morning, Fortnite maker Epic Games made a big announcement to the game’s hundreds of millions of users: It was dropping the price on V-Bucks, Fortnite’s in-game currency, by 20 percent. The “Fortnite Mega Drop,” as Epic called the promotion, took effect immediately on every platform on which the wildly popular battle royale game is available — with one caveat. On iOS and Android mobile devices, you had to choose a new payment method, called “Epic direct payment,” rather than pay through the App Store or Google Play Store, in order to get the discount.

This violated Apple and Google’s rules, and Epic knew it. Both app stores take a significant cut of the app purchases, subscriptions, and in-app payments made on their platforms — 30 percent, in most cases. And, with a few exceptions, they don’t allow apps to advertise ways for users to cut out the middleman by paying their creators directly. But that’s exactly what Epic was doing with its “direct payment” option, which let users pay via PayPal…