Google is expected to miss out on $50 million this year due to Fortnite Play Store absence

Earlier this week, it was announced Fortnite for Android would arrive on select Samsung Galaxy devices before making its way to other supported Android devices. While Fortnite is available via the Samsung Game Launcher app, owners of other Android devices will have to download it from Fortnite’s website because it won’t be available via the Google Play Store. According to a new report, Fortnite’s omission from the Play Store will mean Google could lose $50 million this year alone.

In its report, Sensor Tower explained that having to side load the game could cause some issues, it said:

“There is some concern that by circumventing Google Play, Epic may potentially make it more challenging for users to install Fortnite on devices running older Android versions, where side loading of apps isn’t as straightforward as in more recent releases. We expect this to have some impact on downloads of the game, but not to a large enough degree as to affect its revenue potential in the long run.”

On iOS, the game has apparently grossed more than $180 million since the game launched on March 15th as an invite-only beta that later extended to all iOS users via the App Store. Judging from this figure, Apple has probably made more than $54 million from the game based on the 30% cut it gets on all in-app spending on its store.

Sensor Tower believes that the Android version of the game will draw in a similar amount of revenue as the iOS version did its its first several month. The report says that the game’s increasing popularity and the growing impact of Battle Passes on revenue could see the Android version bring in more money than the iOS version in the same timeframe.

Fortnite is probably one of the biggest games to bypass the Google Play Store, and doing so can make Android users potentially more susceptible to malware as it’ll require users to allow unknown sources in older Android versions. Additionally, Google won’t want other firms following suit so it could lead to the tech giant omitting the side loading capability from its under construction Fuchsia OS, if it was ever intended to have the feature.

Image via Epic Games