Gilliam_Bates

elijahg said:

fastasleep said:

Beats said:

telepathy2000 said:

No law in the country can force Apple to do business with Epic on the App Store. I’m kinda hoping Apple dig in their heels and just never let them come back in. Fads come and go, Fortnite May have gone the way of Angry Birds by the time all this is over. 

And had Apple taken gaming seriously a decade ago they would have wiped Epic from the face of the Earth. I wanna see Apple create a unified Apple Engine for game developers.

Some of us don't want to see Unreal Engine go away. What you guys are missing is that part of the reason we have so many games on macOS/iOS is because Unreal Engine and Unity will *also* compile for those platforms on top of Windows/Linux/XBox/Playstation/Android. Not to mention the amount of realtime film production now being done using Unreal and other XR, animation, previz, etc applications outside of gaming altogether. 

Epic's fairly hypocritical stance regarding the 30% doesn't help their cause at all, though their slice of the sale is only 12%. Unfortunately many of the rabid Apple fanatics here can't see the wood for the trees and blindly defend everything Apple does like it's some kind of religious deity, rather than a for-profit company that couldn't give two shits about some fanatic obsessively defending them. And apparently Apple can't see the wood for the trees either (not really news there though, they're screwing their Mac users by continuing to snub Nvidia, but that's a different story). 

Anyway, losing the Mac userbase is very little concern for Epic, it's probably less than 1% of their revenue. However, it means a *lot* of the Mac games will vanish and will have a lot more effect on Mac users than Epic. A lot of Apple Arcade games are built with the Unreal engine too. In fact almost all the best and most impressive games on AA (i.e. not rehashed versions of the crappy mobile style games that make up 80% of the App Store just with the IAPs removed) are built with UE - and Epic was quick to support Metal with UE. Losing the UE from the Mac and iOS would be a massive blow to Mac and iOS gaming, and ultimately could cause a shift to Android for people who game heavily on iOS.

More and more these days Apple is acting like a bully and it doesn't sit at all well with me. Or the regulators, apparently. It wouldn't be so bad if they actually did something with the money they're raking in rather using it as a platform to spout pious rhetoric from.

DAalseth said:

I don't play Fortnight but I agree with Epic
I've never agreed with Apple claiming a portion of all sales from an app even if those sales don't go through the AppStore.
Some have compared it to having rules for stocking things in your own store.
That's not it
Some have said that Epic and others are trying to profit while not paying for the store.
Not right either
Look at it this way. I have a store. You want to sell something, a computer let's say, in my store. I can and should get a cut of the price for my trouble of hosting your product That's fair.
But should I then demand a cut of everything else that is bought with that computer? I sell a Dell computer so anything purchased from Dell on that computer has to pay a toll back to me even if you're a thousand miles away from my store? Of course not, that would be absurd. 
Yet Apple is demanding a slice of everything bought on Amazon Prime, and Kindle, and all in game purchases, and more, even if those transactions have nothing to do and go nowhere near Apple's store. 
That has never felt right to me. 
Apple should get a cute of sales in their store.
But that should be the end of it. 
Oh and don't go around saying if they don't like it they can go elsewhere, to Android for example. Apple has the only store where developers make significant money. The profits from the android store is a fraction. 
It's like saying if you don't want to pay my forever cut on sales you can go to the other store in the poor section of town where nobody can afford your stuff. 
Not really a choice for most developers.
It's this kind of behavior that's getting Apple in trouble with antitrust hawks. 

InspiredCode said:

Gilliam_Bates said:

No matter who wins, or what trade-offs are made, I doubt these companies will be able to play nicely with each other under the same roof again. I just hope they considered this be4 firing that first bullet.

Of course they have. This all felt scripted and premeditated. Epic does over-the-air update. Apple immediately removes it and issues statement to many news outlets. Epic immediately announces lawsuit run by the nations top antitrust lawyers and releases a commercial explaining their lawsuit.

AppleInsider said:

… marking the first time the feature has been available for a city outside of the U.S.