Fortnite’s Android installer is now a launcher for Epic mobile games

A few weeks after the launch of Fortnite’s second chapter, developer Epic made a seemingly minor change: the Fortnite installer for Android was updated to become the Epic Games App. What was once a tool for keeping Fortnite updated has now transformed into a way for the company to distribute its own mobile games. Today, Epic is launching its second game through the app, a cross-platform title called Battle Breakers, which is available on PC, iOS, and Android through both Samsung’s Galaxy Store and the Epic Games App.

The game itself is a hero-collecting role-playing game. The premise is that ”monsters from space trapped the world’s greatest heroes in technomagic crystal.” Players can save and collect these characters to use in more than 1,000 dungeons, and Epic says that Battle Breakers progress will work “seamlessly” across mobile and PC, much like Fortnite. Battle Breakers also appears to have similar monetization as the battle royale hit, with both an in-game store for buying characters and a battle pass. Epic says that the game was “built as a passion project by a small team” at the company.

The Epic Games Store first launched last December, and at the time, the company expressed interest in eventually bringing it to mobile. Right now, Epic says that the Android app is explicitly for first-party games — i.e., those made by Epic — but it’s hard not to envision a future where that eventually changes. Epic was able to get the Fortnite installer on to millions of phones by making it a requirement for playing the game on Android. By rebranding the app, it now has a powerful tool for distributing games on the platform.

Epic co-founder Tim Sweeney has openly expressed his dislike of mobile app stores in the past, particularly the 30 percent cut that both Google and Apple take from sales. “The 30 percent store tax is a high cost in a world where game developers’ 70 percent must cover all the cost of developing, operating, and supporting their games,” Sweeney told The Verge last August when it was first revealed that Fortnite wouldn’t be available through Google Play. “30 percent is disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform, such as payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service.”