What mobile Fortnite on GeForce NOW means for cloud gaming

Fortnite on mobile has been widely missed since Epic Games’s falling out with Apple and Google in August 2020. A new partnership between Epic Games and Nvidia sees Fortnite truly return to mobile, complete with touch controls. This is not only exciting for Fortnite fans who miss the mobile experience on iOS and Android, but also for the mobile gaming industry as a whole. Here’s why.

What Fortnite on GeForce NOW means for cloud gaming

According to Nvidia’s official blog, Fortnite will be one of the first games to have touch friendly controls despite being streamed. It’s a clever way to get around the main issue with game streaming on mobile devices: touch controls aren’t ideal unless the game or controls were designed with this in mind.

Streaming Fortnite from another machine to your mobile device isn’t new. If you have a PlayStation or Xbox, you can easily cast it through their remote play apps. The catch is that you’ll be playing with other console/PC players, and your latency combined with the clunky touch-screen inputs will usually result in an early game end.

With Fortnite on GeForce NOW, you could have a fairer experience playing against others on the same platform if Epic Games queues you into the old “mobile” servers that’s shared with Nintendo Switch. You’ll be running Fortnite on one of Nvidia’s virtual machines, so you can get a good experience as long as your internet connection is stable.

Even better is that Nvidia has re-implemented the touch controls for Fortnite on GeForce NOW. That’s right, you’ll be running the full version of Fortnite with its original touch controls. It’s like it never left.

Mobile is not the ideal way to play Fortnite, far from it, but it’s another option that lets more people play, especially for folks who don’t have the disposable income to spend on gaming rigs and consoles.

Even more important than Fortnite’s “return” to mobile is what this partnership between Epic Games and Nvidia could mean for the mobile gaming market as a whole. Working with developers, Nvidia can optimize mobile controls to make the experience for players much more comfortable without the need for external peripherals.

Fortnite is just the start. We can look forward to more mobile-friendly overlays for games on GeForce NOW in the future. It’s an opportunity to bring low cost, high quality gaming experiences to more people.