Epic is back on the case and is trying to get Judge Rogers, who is hearing the case of Epic Games vs. Apple, to order Fortnite to be readmitted to the App Store.
The video game development company filed early today for a preliminary injunction against Apple and shared the 182-page document it submitted to the court. The new hearing will take place on September 28th.
Apple has today cancelled the developer account of Epic Games You may recall that Judge Rogers was not willing to issue a temporary restraining order against Apple to protect Epic’s games, partly because Epic had not proven that it had actually been harmed, and partly because the judge felt that Epic “strategically chose to breach its agreements with Apple” and therefore was at least partly to blame.
In the new document, Epic argues that daily active users on iOS have decreased by more than 60% since Fortnite withdrew from the App Store. Epic is concerned that “I may never see these users again.
Epic says that iOS is the largest platform for Fortnite: 116 million registered users, or almost a third of the 350 million registered users in the game. On a daily basis, iOS players represented 10 percent of the total active players. He also claims that 63 percent of Fortnite users in iOS access the game only on iOS, and that it is the only way for many people to play the game.
Epic also explains that its Fortnite player community has been destroyed; and that some of its non-Fortnite users have also suffered collateral damage. Other Epic games are no longer available for download, and Epic says that Shadow Complex Remastered has also been removed from the Mac App Store, after Apple terminated the Epic developer account.
Epic also claims that Apple is threatening to deny any application for a new developer account “for at least a year,” citing a statement from Apple itself, and argues that the damage it would suffer if it were “denied the opportunity to access even a single new user among the more than one billion iOS users for at least the next year” is damage worth creating a preliminary injunction for.