Fortnite for Android has 15 million players and counting, Epic talks fragmentation, will malware

Fortnite for Android is fast and easy. This week, Epic Games is discussing stats on the android release so far, and some of the challenges in bringing the game to Android.

The best gifts for Android

In a blog post, Epic Games has revealed the initial numbers for Fortnite on Android, and it's pretty impressive. Google Play, Fortnite has managed to rack up 23 million players who want to play the game, and over 15 million have downloaded the game on their devices. Those are pretty big numbers for less than a month.

Fortnite's launch on Android, with over 23 million players entering our Android beta and over 15 million players installing our APK. While we are in an invite-only phase for Android, we are in the lead of the iOS beta.

Epic further details the challenges of bringing Fortnite to Android in its post, explaining that partners were crucial to the process. Apparently, Samsung is working closely with companies to optimize their capabilities for Samsung devices. Google was also involved in the process, Qualcomm, Razer, HiSilicon, and more.

Google engineers also visited us on-site to profile and optimize Fortnite, a memory leak, and an openGL framework for OpenGL on Android. The Android engineers at Google are very talented and passionate about making the Android ecosystem and improving it.

Fortnite including ARM, Qualcomm, Imagination Technologies, Razer, HiSilicon, and many others.

One area discussed in the post is also fragmentation, an issue that has caused trouble for Android developers for quite some time. Epic says that it was "pleasantly surprised" to see that they are doing so well with the game. Apparently, 92% of players are currently running Android Oreo or newer. Epic explains that it is different from different profiles to allow the game to run on different hardware.

To manage this complexity, we use the hierarchical device profile system in Unreal Engine. We start by creating four performance profiles: Low, Mid, High, and Epic. These profiles adjust scalability in the engine to allow the game to run with different performance characteristics. Low pulls in view distances as far as possible and disables all optional graphics features. Epic has everything turned on: shadows, foliage, and the farthest view.

On top of this, we have a set of GPU profiles, e.g. Adreno 54x and Mali G72. These GPU profiles choose a performance profile that best fits the hardware's capabilities and enables them to enable specificizations or workarounds needed for that specific hardware. Finally we have a set of device-specific profiles, e.g. Samsung Galaxy Note 9 Adreno and Google Pixel 2 XL. This final layer of device profiles allows us to enable further workarounds or optimizations on specific devices where needed.

Most interestingly, Epic Games also mentioned in this post how it deals with malware. Since the game is not distributed through the Play Store, it's pretty easy for those with malicious intent to download the game.

To help prevent it, Epic Games says it is making an effort to take advantage of Fortnite downloads, considering all distributions outside the Fortnite Install to be unauthorized. To date, Epic has taken down 47 of these sites and has a dedicated internal team which is tasked with policing these sites.

We are looking for new malware sites. In addition, we also have a third party IP and anti-fraud enforcement agency to expand our policing efforts. This case is one of a number of domains that are registered with suspicious URLs so that they may evolve into malicious sites.

What can you do with your video? Add a comment on this video Fortnite's release on Android

More on Fortnite:

Check out 9to5Google on YouTube for more news: