Is it Fortnite’s battle or Tencent/CCP’s battle? The timing certainly seem to indicate the latter considering Tencent owns 40% of Epic and Epic went out of their way to get themselves banned on purpose.
In an incident where even fully US-based organizations were caving to maintain these Chinese market, Tim went full "I don't care what China thinks about what our players say on streams".
Pretty sure Tencent is just in it for the money, Epic's a pretty good investment.
It would be interesting if Fortnite allowed people to make/sell custom skins and see how they would react to a Winnie the Pooh/Xitler skin.
So to me it seems mostly Tim's personal battle. Obviously in the end it's all about money, but Tim seems to genuinely want all game developers (not just Epic) to get a larger cut of the pie as opposed to the platform holders.
The stated purpose of the Epic game store on PC is to give developers a larger cut compared to what Steam was giving them.
Tencent and Chinese companies would benefit from being allowed to operate their own app stores or side load apps, which would allow them to significantly reduce the impact of Trump’s current and future actions.
why would separate app stores limit government jurisdiction?
Whereas now, if the government tell Apple to remove an app from their App Store worldwide then it’s pretty much impossible for anyone to download it. In the past I don’t think the CCP minded - in fact, they were probably happy about it since it made it much easier to censor apps they didn’t like. Whereas now they’re freaking out since they risk having all their apps blocked from all Apple devices worldwide.
I don't think there's any reason to suspect a shadowy cabal of CCP interests when there's plenty of reason why Epic would want to do this out of self interest.
It might be that is just not worth for such a massive game to be free to play, if you can't extrat enough profit from paying users.
They are making lots of money.
I guess my point was, if what is left for shareholders is not "that much" compared with the opportunity cost (the loss of not being doing something else) then it might make sense to put the iOS on hold and let the lawyers fight.
But I'm speculating, I'm just trying to understand the incentives in play, becuase I don't buy the 1984 video, pretending they care about what is fair.