I don’t know if this outcome is good for end users but happy to see Tim Sweeney lose.
They basically are whining and complaining they have to pay the 30% fee for making more than $1 million sales, even though other stores are already doing that.
To me, this was never about consumer freedom. This was about lost revenue to Epic.
Tons of people here hate Apple, but the GP’s point that Epic is not a very sympathetic defendant is very true.
They’re not some small developer losing 30% that could help feed their family, they’re a huge company that is (arguably) exploiting children. They weren’t hurt by a sudden Apple price hike, they agreed to all the terms fairly then unilaterally said “screw you, my money!” In about the most blatant way possible.
And it’s pretty obvious this isn’t because they want to save 30%, it’s because they want to be the store charging others a big percentage and taking game sales revenue. The moment they win this they would have launched suits against the console makers to try to get their way there too.
Epic clearly only cared about themselves and only wrapped themselves in the cloak of “help all developers” for PR purposes.
I suspect a lot of people don’t care one bit about Epic. They just happen to be the name on the plaintiff’s chair.
The big issue is Apple is the only platform that's completely locked down. If Fortnite was kicked off of the Google Play store it'd be no big deal since they could simply tell users how to install it. On PC, it's not even offered on Steam. It's only Apple where getting kicked off the App Store is a death sentence, because they make it practically impossible for their users to install software otherwise.
This is almost certainly why Apple is set to start allowing sideloading. Regardless of how this case turns out, Apple obviously knows they're walking on very thin ice over something really quite silly. I expect on Android > 99% of installs are still driven by the App Store. Sideloading is a liberty very few will take advantage of, so long as your main terms for developers are reasonably fair.
As long as you don’t include consoles who Epic didn’t go after.