Half true. EPIC doesn't really get any value from the App Store except data delivery, which they're more than willing to do themselves. Fortnite is popular enough that the app discovery part of the store is meaningless.
For example, 10 years ago, when Epic made the Citadel demo for Apple to show their smartphones could run games. Ground breaking R&D work, gratis for Apple, & legitimizing their devices.
https://www.theverge.com/21405805/epic-citadel-2010-annivers...
We'll see how much more bad blood Apple can make with developers before people start noticing & caring about the software they can't get on their i-devices.
Apple's SDK doesn't contain a game engine.
2D => https://developer.apple.com/spritekit/
3D => https://developer.apple.com/scenekit/
Alongside lots of other game related goodies, https://developer.apple.com/games/
Second, who would adopt a platform specific "game engine" like scenekit? Are you going to rebuild your whole game to port it, is that the plan here? Apple is categorically unable to compete with actual game engines exactly because they dig their own hole, invent their own proprietary closed technologies (metal, scenekit) up & down the stack. They aren't playing keep up with the real tools, a game of "me too": they can't begin to compete with the real deal even if they tried.
Surely you must be joking?
Apple engines are so bad that Cocos2D-x is basically a copy of their features, using C++ instead of Objective-C/Swift, one of the engines that Google and Microsoft give first class on their platform SDKs.
Not every game engine needs to be a bullet point list copy of Unreal capabilities.
And no I am not joking, contrary to many here, I had a past life in demoscene, been a former IGDA member, previous GDCE attendee (London and Cologne), have been inside a couple of known AAA publishers and have kept my contacts from them.
10 years ago, Epic made the Citadel demo for themselves to show that smartphones could run Unreal Engine 3.
Unity was eating their lunch in mobile. They simply saw how dominant mobile gaming was becoming and did what they had to do to survive.
Absolutely no one was waiting for UE to legitimize Apple's devices. Game developers will use the tools that are present on the platform. All that matters is shipping the game.
The only people who were impressed with Epic's demos were the tech "press".
Apple didn't need Epic support, the only other phone that actually had hardware support for GL ES 1.0 was Nokia N95.
And mobile games have been a thing since J2ME, Brew, Symbian, Windows CE/Pocket PC, with stores getting commissions all the way up to 80%.
Maybe Epic would rather develop games against the early 2000's store model from mobile operators.
Bear in mind Apple didn’t have to do a store at all. Steve Jobs was against the idea and wanted all iPhone apps to be in house from Apple only in order to maintain quality. Alternatively Apple could have implemented APIs and services for side loading apps like on Android. They chose a middle path, and why shouldn’t they? Are the two extremes really the only options that should be tolerated?
I think people underestimate the lengths bored teenagers will go through to play video games, especially free ones.
And Google's play store has value to Epic too - they started by only allowing Fortnight to be side loaded, and moved to the play store.
I suspect that the reason lots of people prefer these devices are precisely because of the app stores. They have confidence that they won't get viruses, confidence in the payment process, ability to lock down devices for kids etc. The ecosystem clearly has a lot of value.
This whole thing is about money. In the first year Epic made $500m from fortnight on ios. Of course they want a larger piece of the pie - Apple got $214m.
I'm not comparing iOS to Android - i'm comparing iOS to every platform EPIC makes money on. 20% is a big chunk yes, but 2 billion instead of 2.5 billion is still a ton of money, and they're obviously willing to sacrifice in order to get to their real goal - bringing the EPIC game store to iOS
If the iOS version was just an appetizer, then you wouldn't be pushing the volume of DLC that make the Apple tax so apparently onerous for them. If you switch to desktop then your purchases are pure profit for them. If not they still make a few bucks.
And since some people (of the younger variety) can't get a PC to game on, but do have a mobile device, cutting themselves off to that profit defeats some of the financial incentive to be on that platform.
Ah, I forgot that bit. So Epic wants to list their products on the App Store and pay Apple $299 a year while they're earning millions off of one game.
As an Apple shareholder, I have to ask: what are they putting in the water over at Epic?
The only charitable explanation I have is that they don't want to put it on the App Store at all, but they aren't allowed to do that.
That's exactly right - they want to be able to install their own EPIC Games store that they can manage and extract 10-15% ish of the sales.