Epic Games Offers Giant Discounts In Fortnite To Beat Apple
Epic Games made a couple of big announcements today related to mobile payments and Fortnite discounts. First and foremost, Epic announced "up to 20% savings on V-Bucks and real-money offers for every purchase," across all of Fortnite's platforms. That's a fairly hefty discount, and it looks like it's kicking in today.
Epic says that on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC, and Mac, those V-Bucks and real-money offers are discounted automatically, with nothing required of players. On mobile, however, it's a little more complicated.
Ever since Fortnite came to mobile, Epic has been looking for a way around the 30% fee both Google and Apple charge on purchases made through their respective App Store. Epic took issue with those charges, first launching Fortnite as an APK-only download on Android to get around it. Now that Fortnite is on the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store, players can make purchases with those app stores acting as the payment processor, but Google and Apple take a 30% cut of each purchase.
To sidestep that, Epic has rolled out a new Direct Payment feature on iOS and Android. If you want the 20% discount Epic is advertising on V-Bucks and real-money purchases, you'll need to use the Direct Payment method at checkout on either Android or iOS. Otherwise, you're stuck paying the full amount (so, for instance, the Epic Mega Drop with 1,000 V-Bucks would cost $9.99 instead of $7.99).
Of course, even with the option to still use the App Store and Play Store as payment processors, Apple and Google may not like this. Apple specifically has been the target of antitrust complaints over its requirement that app developers use the App Store as their sole payment processor, which of course this Direct Payment method from Epic is designed to avoid entirely.
These discounts aren't available in all countries yet, but you can visit Epic's supported countries and currencies page to see if yours is. Players who made V-Bucks and real money purchases in the past 30 days (which is July 14th until today, August 13th, specifically) will get a V-Bucks bonus equivalent to 20% of what they spent in that one-month period as well. You can read more about this discount and Epic's new direct payment method over on the Fortnite website.