tele1234

SpamSandwich said:

According to Wikipedia coverage, Sweeney owns something less than 50% of the company and “Tencent” holds 40% (Tencent is a China-based company that owns “WeChat”, which is one of the apps to be banned from the US).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games

Sounds like with the large China part ownership of the company, they could be a national security risk and they need to be banned from US app stores anyway.

Should this also extend to League of Legends, Call of Duty, Clash of Clans (et. all), World of Warcraft, PUBG, AMC cinemas, GE Appliances and Legendary Pictures?

Beats said:

Apple should just develop a superior engine and destroy Epic.

With Apple Silicon Macs coming they can develop an engine that simultaneously works with Mac/iPad/iPhone/Apple TV. This can cuase an explosion in Apple Arcade support. Imagine your game releases simultaneously on all Apple platforms with little work. Developers would be drooling.

Also, Apple should start "Gaming" the Apple Watch. That's a billion dollar market just waiting. And I don't mean tic-tac-toe on your Watch I mean full scale adventures that connect to Apple TV and real life physical fitness.

Do they have the capital, and the talent? Almost assuredly. However, there is a reason they wouldn't. Creating a game engine as feature-rich as Unreal isn't something that happens with a few years of development, it's a multi-decade evolution if codebase in response to market demands, trends and requirements. It'd be more complex than them building their own instruction set, something I'm sure they wouldn't touch on (yet?) just because they'd rather build on what's already built. If Apple built a game engine today, even if they poured the entire net worth of the company into it, it just couldn't be as developed as Unreal (Or any other engine) until we're installing iOS 30 or something ridiculous, just because it's built on so much prior evolution.

Deploying to all platforms? That's not something you have to imagine, Unreal does that, but so can many other engines. Unreal lets you not only deploy to all iOS platforms but almost literally all platforms, and lets games be developed platform-agnostic until pretty far in the process. It's a driving force in the games industry for a reason, and with that industry being worth a quarter of a trillion a year I'm not sure even apple has the clout to really combat it successfully - they'd have more chance reinventing the car.

jeroenhmg said:

Apple platforms could lose all (future) Unreal-based games, Epic seems tantrum-angry enough to just amputate an arm and ignore the bleeding.
...then again, Unreal-engine is not really going away since engine users/customers can still keep building for Apple platforms using the source.
Epic games could lose distribution channels outside of just Apple on this journey.
Epic could lose engine customers on mobile platforms, they are not the only engine provider, a very good one but not the only one.

It's not just a matter of being 'a very good one', it's a matter of it's the most powerful by a country mile, with easily portability between platforms using familiar languages for software developers. The runners-up don't even come close. Legions of indie game developers for iOS right now would be both (a) out of a job or (b) forced to undergo retraining to keep their jobs, should their companies want to stay on iOS. True, any good developer should be able to transition between platforms with relative ease but it's not an overnight process. It can take months, or even years, to perfect the talent. To use a different example, an airline can't just replace all its Boeing with Airbus - they'd need all new pilots.

Asking developers to abandon Unreal would be as silly as asking end users to abandon iOS. It's not going to happen. True, there was a time when no one thought that the rail companies would disappear, or US Steel would be broken up, or AT&T would have competition, or Microsoft would face scrutiny - the world is a history of monopolies and giants. iOS is one in the mobile platform undeniably, and likewise Unreal is in the gaming world. Some of Apple's biggest games marketing for Apple Arcade are powered by Unreal, and that is something Apple doesn't want to forfit.

FileMakerFeller said:

Why are they not also going after Sony and other platforms that charge 30%?

Sony allows transactions to bypass their store, mostly because Sony sells and makes more money from the platform & installed player-base rather than singular companies and services. i.e, Sony gets their $60 through the player buying PSN+.

Pascalxx said:

Question: would the app ban apply to both iOS and Android in China? are there competing smartphone operating systems in China that could benefit from this?

The discussion of the Android app store in china is irrelevant, as it would be as pointless as banning the macOS application or windows executable. Almost all Chinese android phones have their own app store, and it's easily possible to install either any app store or app itself on the android platform without rooting or any complex technical knowledge. You can just go and download and install it from any site like this.

A ban from the play store would only affect those living in America, and even then they'd just get it from the link above.