The Epic Games experiment went well. The company has proven that many downloads on Android can be typed without Google Play. Only within the beta for a limited number of Android devices, its blockbuster Fortnite generated 15 million installations in three weeks.
The company announced this on September 6 in the official blog. There she also revealed that there were even more approved applications for participation in the beta (now access to the game is possible only by invitation) — 23 million. Apparently, not everyone was ready to download a third-party APK.
For comparison, in the first two weeks of beta testing on iOS, the game gained 10 million installs. At the same time, the game was distributed, like any other product on the App Store, through the “official” channel, and not its own, as in the case of Android.
By the way, despite the fact that Fortnite was released on Android outside Google Play, its developers still worked closely with Google specialists. This is reported in the same post. The company’s engineers helped Epic Games with optimization and search for the memory leak problem.
Recall that the Android version of Fortnite was released on August 9 for a limited number of devices (primarily for the Samsung line). The rejection of Google Play was dictated by the desire to work with users without intermediaries and the rejection of the store’s ecosystem, which takes 30% for itself, but at the same time sells search results.
Epic Games is currently working on improving the stability of the game on supported devices. Epic Games will also optimize Fortnite for better performance on older and slower smartphones. However, according to the official statement, “far into the past” will not go.
“Every year top smartphones become 50% more powerful than a year earlier. Fortnite works acceptably on devices from two years ago, decently on last year’s phones and remarkably on those devices that came out this year. Now imagine how Fortnite will look on the phones that will be released next year!”.
In other words, the company hints that for good Fortnite performance, players should purchase new equipment.
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