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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.”
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.
