Epic Games has now upped its battle with Apple on the Labor Day weekend and the tech giant’s ban on its immensely popular game “Fortnite” from iOS devices like iPhones and iPads.
On Friday night just before the holiday, Epic filed a motion for a preliminary injunction against Apple, attempting to force them to bring “Fortnite” back to the App Store reports The Verge.
Earlier Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers was unwilling to issue a temporary restraining order against Apple to protect Epic’s games. This was in part because Epic hadn’t proven it had actually been harmed, in part because the judge felt that Epic “strategically chose to breach its agreements with Apple” and so was at least partially to blame.
In the new filing, Epic argues the point about being harmed claiming: “Daily active users on iOS have declined by over 60% since Fortnite’s removal from the App Store.” Epic says iOS is the biggest platform for “Fortnite” with 116 million registered users – nearly a third of the 350 million registered users Epic says “Fortnite” has attracted in total.
They also claim 63% of “Fortnite” users on iOS access the game only that way (and not through other methods like Mac OS X, PC or Android) and that it’s the only way for many people to play the game. Epic says it’s worried it “may never see these users again” and that its “Fortnite” community of players has been torn apart.
Some of Epic’s other games are also no longer available to re-download on the Mac App Store, such as “Shadow Complex Remastered” which was removed after Apple terminated Epic’s developer account.
Epic is also claiming that Apple is threatening to deny any attempts to apply for a new developer account “for at least a year” and the harm of “being denied the opportunity to access even a single new user among the one-billion-plus iOS users for at least the next year” is harm worth creating a preliminary injunction for.
Hearings were already scheduled for September 28th, now they’ll get even more interesting.