Fortnite is no longer available to install on iPhones and iPads.
As the fight between Apple and Epic Games continues to escalate, the iPhone maker decided to pull the popular Battle Royal title off the App Store.
So if you’ve got an iPhone with Fortnite installed on it, you may be in posession of an endangered species.
And some users are already trying to capitalise by listing their phones on eBay for ridiculous prices.
In one case, a phone with Fortnite on it is being sold for $10,000 (£7,500).
Many other listings are up on eBay for between £2,000 and £5,000 – far, far more than a conventional iPhone would cost.
And, ironically, Fortnite is of course a totally free game – making all its money from in-app payments and collaborations.
The reason for the beef between Epic Games and Apple is down to the cut the latter takes of all in-app transactions inside the game.
Epic Games is suing Apple because they’ve taken Fortnite off the App Store, as part of a long-running dispute regarding the 30% cut Apple takes from all in-app purchases.
Last Thursday, Epic offered an option to buy V-Bucks, Fortnite’s in-game currency, directly from them at a 20% discount. This is against the App Store guidelines, which state that all payments have to go through them, so that Apple can claim their 30% of the revenues.
Epic clearly knew that this would cause Apple to remove Fortnite, as they filed their lawsuit within minutes of it happening.
Indeed, the whole thing seems to be part of a complex plan by Epic to try and set-up their own app store as competition, just as they created a competitor to Steam on the PC.
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