- Fortnite developer Epic Games and Apple have been locked in a prolonged legal battle over commissions on in-app purchases for nearly five years. A federal judge brutally chastised the iPhone maker last month for ignoring her injunction and continuing to engage in anticompetitive behavior.
The developer of Fortnite said Apple blocked the popular game from the App Store in the U.S. and the European Union Friday, just weeks after a federal judge handed Epic Games a major victory over the iPhone maker in court.
“Now, sadly, Fortnite on iOS will be offline worldwide until Apple unblocks it,” Epic Games said in a social media post Friday morning.
According to Apple’s guidelines, 90% of submissions are reviewed in less than 24 hours. On Wednesday, however, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said the company submitted a new version for review to include the game’s weekly update.
“We asked that Epic Sweden resubmit the app update without including the U.S. storefront of the App Store so as not to impact Fortnite in other geographies,” an Apple spokesperson said in a statement. “We did not take any action to remove the live version of Fortnite from alternative distribution marketplaces.”
Apple initially removed Fortnite from the App Store in 2020 after Epic Games tried to skirt paying commissions on in-app purchases by users, sparking a prolonged legal battle. Five years ago, Apple pulled Fortnite from the App Store hours after Epic Games had released an update allowing users to purchase “V-bucks,” Fortnite’s in-game currency, directly from the developer at a discount. The dispute has been playing out ever since.
Then last month, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled Apple had defied a previous order by continuing to prevent developers from offering alternate payment options. Epic Games announced last week it had submitted Fortnite for review to be reinstated on the App Store.
After nearly five years in the courts, the drama is likely just getting started, Danny Karon, an attorney who represents plaintiffs and defendants in antitrust and other class-action lawsuits, told Fortune.
“It’s only a few years old,” Karon, who teaches at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and the University of Michigan Law School, said of the legal battle. “There’s a lot of runway left.”
Apple in legal trouble
The latest controversy comes shortly after Gonzalez Rogers found Apple “knew exactly what it was doing” when it violated her 2021 injunction. She had previously ruled the 30% commission Apple charged on in app-purchases was anticompetitive and said developers had the right to shepherd users outside of Apple’s ecosystem to make payments.
But Apple’s efforts to comply with the order “strained incredulity,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote. Apple responded by charging a 27% commission on any purchases made by users after tapping through external purchase links, she noted. The judge also found Apple tried to thwart developers with tactics like full-page “scare screens” aimed at stirring up privacy fears and requirements that forced customers to log-in multiple times to make payments outside of the App Store.
“Apple’s continued attempts to interfere with competition will not be tolerated,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote.
The judge also said Apple tried to cover up its actions in court. The judge asked federal prosecutors to investigate whether Apple and Alex Roman—a vice president of finance who “outright lied under oath,” according to Gonzalez Rogers—should be charged with criminal contempt.
“It seems that Apple can’t get out of its own way,” Karon said.
The company’s App Store guru, Phil Schiller, advocated internally for complying with the order, Gonzalez Rogers said, before then-CFO Luca Maestri convinced CEO Tim Cook otherwise.
“Cook chose poorly,” the judge wrote.
Companies like Spotify joined Epic Games in celebrating the ruling. Apple said it disagreed with the decision and intended to appeal.
After Epic started its fight against Apple with an antitrust suit five years ago, Gonzalez Rogers ruled in favor of Apple on nine out of ten counts, finding that the Silicon Valley giant could not be considered a monopolist under California or U.S. law.
“Success is not illegal,” she wrote in 2021.
Gonzalez Rogers did give Epic Games one crucial victory, however, issuing a nationwide injunction that said Apple could not prohibit developers from directing users to make in-game purchases outside of the app.
The Ninth Circuit of Appeals affirmed that and much of the judge’s ruling. The Supreme Court declined to review the case in January 2024, and the injunction went into effect the next day.
