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Comment by fishywang | Hacker News Reader

My prediction is that this will backfire so badly for Apple.

Apple clearly underestimated how popular Unreal Engine is to game developers. Apple probably expect developers to just switch to other engines when they took UE away from them, but in reality most of the developers currently using UE will just stop publishing on Apple's platforms because that's no longer a profitable platform (consider the investment for developing for Apple's platforms with new engine against the profit they can get there).

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I'm sure that Tim Sweeney has talked with Tencent (owns 40% of Epic) about his plans beforehand. Tencent owns Riot Games (League Of Legends) and parts of several other gaming companies. They also own WeChat,WeGame, QQ, etc.

Epic may be just a test case. Everyone else is watching and if Apple blinks, they will side with Epic and Apple must give up huge revenue stream.

And if they don't and courts side with Apple, Tencent might be willing to pay the damage. The upside across their companies is large enough to justify the damage.

If courts side with Apple, Google might be next depending on their behavior (Google has banned them but doesn't appear as aggressive yet).

Given that game porters currently chose Metal over alternatives specifically to support the lucrative Apple market better, I'm pretty sure they'd jump ship instantly to Unity or something else that isn't an engina non grata.

People have been bending over to Apple in their choice of technologies for at least as long as OSX is a thing. A gaming engine (not even the most popular one on mobile) isn't gonna change that at all.

Jumping ship instantly from one engine to another isn't possible. You're talking about developers doing a full rewrite of their games. Sure, plenty of mobile games are crap that can be cranked out in a coke-fueled weekend (see Zynga). But there are also mobile games that required significant development effort to build.

Oh, of course. I meant it more in case of newly written games. The ones that already run UE4 may likely meet a slow, neglected death.

Are you sure? iOS is something like half the US market and its userbase is likely more wealthy on average, I don't think any normal game developer could sacrifice that to keep using what is essentially an implementation detail at the end of the day, no matter how good it is.

half the US market but how much of gaming market? Personally I have always used macs but I have a windows desktop specific for gaming. I don't think anybody somewhat into gaming would have bought an apple machine for that purpose.

A cursory google search indicated that mobile gaming represents about 45% of the total games industry [1]. That's quite a lot, I'd say that the potential risk here is well into "unacceptable" territory.

[1] https://kommandotech.com/statistics/mobile-gaming-statistics....

For more serious/less casual games, they generally primarily target computers and consoles than mobile devices. I believe Unreal is more popular for these types of games (whereas Unity and others are more favoured for mobile games). If you are not targetting mobile, Apple has far less representation.

Because if there's one thing Apple customers choose Macs for, it's to play games...

That's exactly my point. When a game developer made a game using UE, their investment to also making a Mac port is negligible, so even if the market on Macs are small it's still worth doing for most cases. When UE on Mac is no longer an option, if they want a Mac port they need to pour some real resources into the Mac port. Consider the small market they are more likely to just skip that.

They didn't take Unreal Engine away from anyone and every other platform also charges 30%.

1) They are also suing Google

2) Android allows them to distribute Fortnite from other venues if they chose to

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