My Watch Has Ended: Fortnite Is Back On The App Store

After five years, Fortnite returned to the Apple App Store today. As someone who woke up one morning in August 2020 and tossed up a quick blog about Epic introducing its own payment system on mobile, a niche news hit that quickly spiralled into multiple high-profile court battles between massive companies that dragged on for years, I don't know what I'm going to do with myself now.

The Fortnite Twitter account announced the news this evening, linking to the game on the App Store. As of this writing, I couldn't find it when I searched "Fortnite," but I was able to find it by searching for Epic Games.

The game's return follows a ruling at the end of April that Apple was disobeying the orders from the 2021 ruling in the case by taking a large commission from purchases outside the App Store and overly restricting how developers could point users to alternate payment systems. Following the April ruling, Epic submitted Fortnite to the App Store once again, then withdrew and resubmitted it when Apple didn't reply to the request. Yesterday, the judge basically ordered Apple to figure it out, and now here we are. In the meantime, Fortnite has been playable on some mobile devices in the US and in the EU on Epic's own mobile storefront, though none of this has been as widespread or as seamless as the App Store.

To make myself the protagonist of this news story: It's kind of a big moment for me. That very first blog led me into my first foray into reading court documents, and I followed every update of the case for months, spending my weekends tediously reading through filings and looking up every legal phrase I didn't know. When one of the earliest rulings came down, I actually had a nightmare that I'd missed it, only to wake up in the middle of the night and realize I had missed it. The day the trial started I was at New York's Javits Center, listening to the disastrous call-in line while waiting to get my first covid shot. By the time the judge decided the case I had left Kotaku, and I found myself frantically posting my way through the court documents on social media while visiting my parents. When they asked what I was doing, I said "working," and they politely reminded me that... no I wasn't, because I didn't have a job, which was one of the first moments my departure from Kotaku really sunk in. I feel like I grew alongside this case as a journalist, while I probably devolved a little as a person, boring anyone who would listen with why, yeah it's that game with all the dances, but listen, Epic's arguments are actually kind of a big deal if you care about tech monopolies.

And now here we are. I don't know what I'll do with all my freed-up brain space, or all the time I'll get back now that I won't feel pressured to constantly keep tabs on Tim Sweeney's Twitter. Apple appealed the April ruling, so we'll see if this is really the end, but fittingly, writing this blog has made me late to meet some friends, whom I will absolutely bore to tears with this latest update, and who will humor me politely while wishing I would stop talking about this.