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Epic Games Pays Apple $6 Million as Ordered by Court
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Ok? I mean, obviously they can do whatever they want with their money, but I don't see why they "should" donate it to charity any more than any other fees that they are owed. This isn't a gift Epic is giving Apple. They are simply paying fees (plus interest) that they should have paid in the first place instead of cheating the system.
Possible, but for a lot of younger customers (aka teens and tweens) the iPhone or iPad may be the only gaming device they have. Frankly I'm not a huge fan of the freemium model targeting kids anyway (or in general to be honest) but I think a sizable chunk may have no option. If EPIC is lucky they'll stick around until EPIC pulls its head out of its cloaca and just puts the IAP mechanism back as normal and pays Apple its cut, but honestly I wouldn't be surprised if those users who have no other option for gaming have moved on to other games by now.
I’m sure not everyone moved over, but I’m guessing most households with kids also have a PlayStation, Xbox, or Switch around as well.
I know right?
And to think I admired this guy back in the day. He created ZZT, one of my favorite DOS games.
Money really does turn people into dicks.
Like Apple's rules or not, Epic had a contract in place with Apple, and they purposefully broke that contract to force Apple into court. They added an in-game payment system *first* and then waited till they got kicked for blatantly violating their contract.
Apple's never taken 100% of the profits of any company's revenue on the App Store.
Now, Apple's rates might be bad, and not allowing companies to use out-of-app purchasing systems might be bad. But Epic joined the App Store in full agreement to Apple's terms, they made millions and millions (probably hundreds of millions) of dollars in Apple's store. Then when they decided they didn't want to pay the fees for millions and millions more, they broke their contract.
I'm not sure how you get to "...we'll put Fortnite back in the App Store as soon as we can take 100% of the profits" out of that?
There are over 1 BILLION active iPhones in the world. That means that Apple's 30 percent fee gets Epic access to 1 BILLION customers.
They're perfectly welcome to go build their own OS, their own devices, their own App Store, and their own payment system. Instead they agreed to use Apple's, on Apple's terms. And they made a huge amount of money as a result of that decision.
If an individual fails to pay a court-ordered judgment, the court will garnish your wages. I imagine there's a similar process for commercial entities ... maybe even personal legal liability for directors/officers? So ... not really surprising.
Digital stuff has zero marginal cost. That's why the commission is so high. If it was shoes then the commission would be zero I think.
Well, corporations used to recognize that part of the profit was for paying the poor salesman who stood there waiting while my wife tried on 35 pairs of shoes to pick THE ONE that she bought (if they were lucky).
Paying sales people used to be part of the 'cost of business', but now salespeople are considered 'liabilities', and a drain on profit. A cost to be 'managed'...
Digital is expensive. Server farms need to be maintained, power needs to be managed, cooling needs to be paid for, people need to be paid to monitor said buildings, and need to be ready at a moments notice to spring forth and fix things. It's NOT cheap, and as the local temperatures soar, and demand grows, the heat is a HUGE issue to be dealt with. AND the pipeline isn't cheap to allow so many people to drink from the same source. (I remember the 'olde days', when the server you hit could be on the end of an ISDN line, and there are too many sipping already)
Unless you want to volunteer your home computer to the task...
No, in my experience, it's 'most'.
A nice girl I used to love married a doctor, and you would think she became royalty. Nothing was ;good enough' for her after that. The air 'up there' must have been pretty low on oxygen...
Epic was talked into this by lawyers who all got paid very, very well and won't bother returning Epic's calls once Epic doesn't have the 'stupid' money to throw around. So, Epic, was played by lawyers who said, "What's the worst you can lose!? And maybe you'll win!" Epic was the victim of grifters! Epic was the John.
Not likely.
I'm sure they were assured 'they will win on appeal'. Apple has paid insane amounts to settle cases, and then gotten the money back, and occasionally more. I've heard some corporations allot certain amounts of cash just for that purpose. It's a shell game...
But, yeah, lawyers do make far too much money than they should.
Cool, Apple can take some of that $6M - along with a few billion and supply free batteries for some of us 12-12Pro/ProMax user phones!
Junk cheap batteries!
Junk cheap batteries!
Hard to know, since all you had to do to keep playing was switch platforms.
Epic had to pay for the credit card payment processing fees and eat any theft-of-service costs. For small payments, such as in-game purchases, the card processing fees can be substantial.
If the 30% is such a big deal, why not build Fortnight for the web and let players log in via their browsers? It doesn't seem like Fortnight uses many, if any, of the native iOS API. I feel like they spent a bunch of money on lawyers, when instead they could've invested it in building out their technology infrastructure... which could have in turn benefitted many Unreal Engine developers.