Anyone have a sense of who is winning or losing here (besides the legal proceedings)?
Outside of Hacker News, this story seems dead.
Outside of Hacker News, this story seems dead.
Epic vs Google was covered in The Economist this week. It's a very big deal.
It will be real hard for a judge to have to agree with them. They could have corrected it, got back into compliance and continued their legal case, but this was not the route they picked.
They gambled, and have (most likely) lost.
I'm under the impression that they had to do more-or-less what they did (minus the press blitz) in order to have legal standing to bring a case.
In this case, I think they are arguing that the harm occurs because "who decides if you can be on the App Store" should not be a monopoly, and users should be able to decide if they trust Epic to handle payments instead of Apple.
The argument is that the TOS itself is (or should be ruled), in its current form, illegal.
This case is particularly interesting, because it is clear that Apple + Google have a duopoly on a very important market, and both companies exhibit near-identical anti-consumer behavior in this particular respect. So while consumers may have a nominal choice, they do not have a real choice about a decision facet that matters. I'm curious about any anti-trust precedent here, and how this was handled in the courts. (i.e. two separate lawsuits against the companies in question, some sort of unified legal plea...?) How is (implicit) collusion handled?
They were paying the 30%. That’s harm enough.
Civil disobedience isn’t something courts deal with favourably. In a society with rule of law, they shouldn’t. It’s designed to get the public’s and legislature’s sympathy.
As such, I judge it poorly based solely on timing. In the middle of a pandemic and recession, in the midst of an election year, I suspect most Americans would be livid if the Congress prioritised a developer / tech giant compensation dispute.
It's interesting to think about this in the context of "smart contracts" etc. -- the rule of law is stronger if it is more unambiguously encoded.
If our current judicial system is deliberately interpreting morality, rather than encoding our sense of morality into the laws themselves, that seems like a rather obvious opportunity for advancing legal systems, especially in an age where we will be forced to codify human morality anyway. The check-and-balance can be moved to judging laws instead of individual cases, and a new system can be grown for bringing cases against laws instead of parties.
Apple's point, that the judge seems to agree with is "How can we be causing you harm when you did this to yourself?"
To provide a source for this: (ctrl-f escrow) https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1310618271675105282.html
They might still lose but the fact they broke the TOS won't count against them.
- Mobile is a tiny portion of fortnite
- Unreal engine is the long term money maker not fortnite
- The 40% owner (tencent) has lots of financial motivation to support this outside of Epic's potential profit, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were willing to pay the company off to make this lawsuit happen
0: They don't release numbers, but it's always consistently on the first page of Twitch game viewership https://www.twitch.tv/directory?sort=VIEWER_COUNT
2) Epic's endgame isn't Fortnite, it's the Epic Games Store. Tim Sweeney is a smart businessman, he knows that Fortnite's shelf-life is limited. He's seen Steam make an order of magnitude more money for Valve than its games. EGS would not only diversify Epic away from Fortnite, it would bring in far, far more revenue (not to mention tying up nicely with licensing the Unreal Engine to developers).
3) With EGS on the App/Play Stores, Epic would be positioned to capture literally billions of revenue. The potential reward is so large, it's worth throwing almost everything you have into the Apple/Google lawsuit.