Fortnite for Android devices has certainly attracted attention recently, with Epic Games bypassing the Play Store and going it alone as far as distribution of the game has been concerned. The move is expected to see Google miss out on $50 million as it misses out on its 30% cut of revenues from in-app purchases. However, the Mountain View company later discovered an epic blunder in the Fortnite downloader that left it wide open to silent install fake APKs.
Nonetheless, that stumble seems not to have deterred the masses from getting onboard with the title and Epic Games has revealed how well it has done so far in its blog post, saying that:
"In the first 21 days since the Fortnite’s launch on Android, interest has been extremely high, with over 23 million players entering our Android beta and over 15 million players installing our APK. While we are in an invite-only phase for Android, our conversion from players being invited to playing is similar to that of the iOS beta."
While that"s not a bad result for its first three weeks after launch, the company has had its work cut out for itself as far as dealing with websites attempting to impersonate Epic Games, with some popping up before the game"s actual release. No less than 47 unauthorized websites purporting to host the mobile game have had action initiated against them by the studio with the aim to constrain access to those sites via its anti-fraud partners or, ultimately, having them shut down.
In the meantime, Epic has continued to work on optimizing the game for devices that are currently supported and fixing issues such as audio problems that were resolved in Version 5.40 of Fornite for Android. In parallel, the company has been working with device manufacturers, such as Samsung, to improve driver and Unreal Engine 4 performance.
Of course, it remains to be seen as to how much steam the Fortnite juggernaut has left in it but it seems to have gotten off to a fairly good start.
Source: Epic Games via 9to5Google