Epic Games Drops Support For Samsung’s Galaxy Store to Protest Against “Rent Collectors”

As Epic Games is getting ready to launch its Epic Games Store on Android and iOS, the company detailed its new strategy regarding other mobile stores yesterday. Going forward, the Fortnite maker plans to make its games available in stores that support developers with rewarding revenue-sharing deals, in addition to its own Epic Games Store. However, Epic Games will also be pulling its games from third-party stores that it considers to be treating developers badly.

“Today, we’re announcing that Epic also plans to bring our own mobile games including Fortnite to other mobile stores that give all developers a great deal. And, we will be ending distribution partnerships with mobile stores that serve as rent collectors without competing robustly and serving all developers fairly, even if those stores offer us a special deal for our own games,” the company explained.

That’s why the company also announced that it will soon remove Fortnite and its other games from Samsung’s Galaxy Store, which is preinstalled on all Galaxy devices. After Epic Games decided to remove Fortnite from the Google Play Store back in 2018, the Galaxy Store was the easiest way to get the game on Galaxy devices. The alternative on non-Galaxy devices is to download the Epic Games app from the web.

Epic Games said that this move was “in protest of Samsung’s anticompetitive decision to block side-loading by default on Samsung Android devices, and as a result of public revelations in the US Epic v Google lawsuit of ongoing Google proposals to Samsung to restrain competition in the market for Android app distribution.” While the Galaxy Store will soon lose Epic Games’ mobile games, the company said that it’s planning to make them available soon on AltStore, the first iOS alternative app store in the EU, as well as two other alternative app stores that it didn’t name.

As for the mobile version of the Epic Games Store, Epic Games emphasized that it will take a 12% cut on all payments the company processes, and 0% on transactions going through third-party payment systems. While this is undoubtedly good for developers on paper, it remains to be seen if Android and iOS users (only in the EU) are willing to deal with multiple stores instead of the default app distribution options they’ve been using for years.