Do you see deliberately kicking themselves off of Apple platforms as "clamoring so hard"? On the contrary, Epic saw the platform was terrible for shooter games and driving extremely little value, and thus was happy to fight the monopoly on behalf of their _other_ main consumer - game engine developers.
> they were losing ungodly money after millions of iOS based gamers stopped playing Fortnite
Sorry but this is just laughable, and the numbers are all there in the lawsuit already. Almost no one played Fortnite on IOS. Some players installed on mobile but the majority solely used it as a web frontend to purchase cosmetics. Thus robbing Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo of their commissions for creating the platforms that players _actually_ play on.
> leech money off you or your kids like Fortnite.
If it wasn't obvious you have some weird bone to pick already, this certainly proves it. Epic's monetization model is wildly less predatory than the vast majority of mobile games. Why are you speaking so confidently about something you seem to know nothing about?
> [iOS] is actually providing Epic a ton of value and profit > Apple offers developers significantly more than just a games engine. (comment from threeseed)
Apple sells hardware to consumers (above cost), then blocks consumers from actually using the hardware they own, and developers from distributing software for it, without paying Apple a monopolistically-high cut of sales. All Apple provides to developers is access to consumers who are blocked from their own hardware, and a nominal file distribution via CDN. A game engine provides an order of magnitude more value to developers than a CDN file distribution platform offers.
If Apple was providing real value to developers they wouldn't be so deathly afraid of competing with other app distributors.