Fortnite Temporarily Removes Shopping Carts and ATK Due to Bug

The shopping carts and the new ATK vehicle have brought a ton of joy to Fortnite players since [...]

By Liana 'LiLi' Ruppert

The shopping carts and the new ATK vehicle have brought a ton of joy to Fortnite players since they were added into the popular Battle Royale title, unfortunately - they are going to have to go away for a little while.

Epic Games took to Twitter to let fans know about the temporary removal of these features, stating "Due to a bug with the Shopping Cart and ATK, we're temporarily disabling them in all game modes until we have a fix. We'll update you once this is resolved."

Obviously the removal of carts and ATKs has players asking one, very serious question:

One of this week's challenges requires players to hop into a cart or ATK and hop through five of the flaming hoops that are scattered across the Battle Royale map. At the time it just looks like you'll have to wait until they're added back before you can complete this challenge.

In other Fortnite news, Epic Games has finally addressed why the Android version of the mobile game won't be available in the Google Play store. A weird move, given that Google Play is to Android what the Apple Store is to iOS.

According to the company, "Epic's goal is to bring its games directly to customers. We believe gamers will benefit from competition among software sources on Android," Sweeney said in a new Q&A. "Competition among services gives consumers lots of great choices and enables the best to succeed based on merit." Google is hearing similar rhetoric in Europe, where it's been fined $5 billion for forcing its own software onto all Android phones instead of giving users a choice of which search and browser software to download for themselves.

But EPIC's motives aren't purely altruistic. There's a significant financial motivation to bypass the Google Play Store as well. Google would otherwise take a 30% cut of Fortnite's profits, and that's money EPIC would rather keep. Sweeney doesn't deny it.

"Avoiding the 30 per cent 'store tax' is a part of Epic's motivation. It's a high cost in a world where game developers' 70 per cent must cover all the cost of developing, operating, and supporting their games. And it's disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform, such as payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service. We're intimately familiar with these costs from our experience operating Fortnite as a direct-to-customer service on PC and Mac."

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