Month: July 2018

The YouTube desktop site was designed for 16:9 video, with videos in any other aspect ratio—most commonly 4:3 for old TV material or 9:16 for vertical smartphone video—padded with black bars until they fit the 16:9 box. In a change that Google is currently rolling out, those black bars are now being scrapped, and the video box will instead take on the aspect ratio of the content it's showing.

For 4:3 content, this means a bigger picture. It will be both wider and taller, pushing the title, description, and comments further down the page. For vertical video, the benefits are less apparent—empty space will open up on each side of the video—but even there, removal of the black bars means that narrow browser windows are less likely to cause the video to be sized down. Even 16:9 video is getting a little larger due to reduced margins and white space.

Enlarge / Fortnite's season five outfits and cosmetics. If XDA's report is accurate, Epic Games won't have to give up 30 percent of Android purchases of these outfits to Google. (credit: Epic Games)

Update 2, August 3, 1:25pm ET: As Epic prepares to roll Fortnite's first Android version out in the very near future, the game maker has responded to rumors and leaks by confirming that this version will entirely bypass the Google Play app store. Fortnite players on Android will have to take the uncommon step of going straight to a web site, downloading an "APK" file, and opening up Android's permissions to approve the game's install.

Epic's FAQ on the matter is currently hosted exclusively at Eurogamer, as written by Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, and the developer has apparently written its own questions to answer. The most intriguing one, "Is this just a way for Epic to keep the 30 percent that Google would take if you were on Play," receives a frank answer:

Avoiding the 30 percent "store tax" is a part of Epic's motivation. It's a high cost in a world where game developers' 70 percent 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.

An additional question doubles down on Epic wanting to reclaim that 30 percent fee for the sake of development costs and server overhead—though it does not address Google Play's guarantees of malware scanning for any app downloaded. (Sweeney wouldn't have to look hard to find exceptions to Play's malware-free promises, but he doesn't mention any here.)