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Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

macrumors.com

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Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#651

Post by lstroud »

_qulr wrote: post #523
mattmanser wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see how Epic wins this. If Stripe can claim Wells Fargo doesn't want to process porn payments, and that's legal, how can an American court rule for Epic? Epic are obviously going to lose, and lose hard, or set a precedent that's going to screw every payment provider in America and open a flood gate for fraudulent payments. You can't force someone to sell something they don't want to, especially because Apple…

The iPhone is not a store. The App Store is a store. Epic wants to be on the iPhone, but not necessarily in the App Store. Ideally, Epic wants to run its own store on the iPhone. In any case, App Store is the only store in town, where the "town" is the 1.5 billion iOS users. If there's only 1 store, with no competing stores, that's an entirely different situation legally.

Can’t Epic build their own phone? Are their barriers to entry that Apple has put in place to prevent them from building and selling a phone?

Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#652

Post by CharlesMerriam2 »

History is interesting here.

Capitalism, according to Wealth of Nations, has some problems with corporations becoming monopolies. When Teddy Roosevelt was sidelined into the Vice President position, it was partly to sideline the movement towards regulation and trust-busting. That period, due an assassination, broke up large companies.

We now have Apple, and a host of other players, using monopoly powers to extract value from any who would play. Epic may have done that math and found the tax was too high to be profitable, or that upsetting the monopoly was worthwhile. History may turn again, and monopolies may face more scrutiny.

The uncertainty of changes are one of the joys of a government system that is organized mob rule.

Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#653

Post by jonlucc »

zemo wrote: post #531
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony here is that PUBG is made with the Unreal Engine, which they're being forced by a judge not to cut off from their platform, and Epic still gets 5% of all revenue from PUBG.

do you actually need to download unreal engine from the app store to build unreal engine games on ios or do gamedevs download the unreal engine tools and sdks on a desktop and then compile their games for ios from the desktop and sign them with their own app store dev accounts and upload them to the app store

I was trying to figure this out before. As I understand it from other discussions (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), the majority of developers bundle Epic's engine with their game, so it is delivered with the game in the app store. Those would not be harmed by and Epic entity being terminated by Apple, EXCEPT that it would hurt Epic's ability to develop new versions and support the already existing Unity engine and their customers. Because this court case might drag on for months but much more likely years, the court didn't think it was ok to allow Apple to terminate the dev account for the part of Epic that makes the engine, Epic International. This news is specifically about Epic Games, the company that makes Epic games, not the engine.

Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#654

Post by Despegar »

sfifs wrote: post #545
pvg wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The harsher that Apple retaliates, the better Epic's court case. Apple is playing right into his hands. I keep seeing seeing assessments in this vein but they can't really be right - the courts would have to be toddler-level naive not to see through it. They aren't - here's Judge Rogers addressing Epic at the recent hearing (as reported by Sarah Jeong): "To Epic: Your client created this situation. Your client does n…

What I think is happening is Epic is trying to force a jury trial on anti-trust and won't hold out for a settlement unlike Amazon and Netflix. At this stage all Epic's actions are geared basically around collecting arguments to bring in front of a jury composed of regular folks. I'm very confident the old Steve Jobs emails from the eBooks anti-trust case will also be brought into the trial to argue anti-trust is in A…

There won't be a jury trial. It will be decided in Apple's favor on summary judgement.

Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#655

Post by nuker »

RonanTheGrey wrote: post #650
nuker wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is like in Amazon sold a fridge and said you can only shop at Whole Foods. So why would anyone buy such fridge? And if they do, there clearly are other benefits, which you omitted.

My wife is absolutely obsessed with getting the latest iPhone when her current device (Android) either breaks or otherwise stops being useful. Her reason? "It's the best phone". Why? "Because it's super expensive". Why? "I don't know everyone says it's the best phone." It would surprise me if any conversation about why to buy an iPhone ever went deeper than that, 99.99999% of the time. The HN crowd is absolutely an e…

I think you may get better answers after she buys it.

Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#656

Post by RonanTheGrey »

flingo wrote: post #511
btown wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An important part of this is that as far as I can tell, most AAA mobile games now ship all but the most fundamental "code updates" as updates to interpreted scripts/data files over the Internet, bypassing the App Store update mechanism. (Where does data end and code begin? That's a philosophical argument that historically Apple could look the other way on for high-performing mobile games with weekly or even more freq…

Apple's iOS ToS specifically forbids downloading and executing code by the app. (with a definition of "code", and "execute" somewhere in the document) While you could technically hide this from them during the review stage, apple can stop any app from functioning on any iOS device connected to the internet by revoking the certificate, if they discover it at a later stage. Are there noteworthy apps that break this ter…

The Simpsons game regularly downloads game updates, and much to my chagrin because the updates are gigantic.

This is extremely common in games, less so in productivity apps.

Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#657

Post by aww_dang »

What doesn't bend must break. App stores and other walled gardens seem imposing and dominating until they aren't.

Remember the original ideal of the HotJava browser, where fully sandboxed applications could be published online?

JS has come a long way in fulfilling that vision. PWAs are trustless and require no approval from appstores. Of course they aren't as efficient as native applications, but performance is improving.

Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#658

Post by risyachka »

I am a developer and I really can't understand the arguments against Apple.

And I have many apps on iOS store, and sure I would love to pay a less cut.

But Apple's pricing policy was the same way before they had 50% share of phones. Sure a monopoly must be regulated, but it doesn't mean that if a company has >50% share you can dictate how they should price their product.

Monopolies should be regulated so they don't increase prices or take advantage of their position. And if the policy is 10 years old this is obviously has nothing to do with bad practices of monopoly.

Re: Apple Terminates Epic Games' Developer Account

#659

Post by nodamage »

d3nj4l wrote: post #633
nodamage wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is the only available counterweight for their behaviour "drop everything and buy a new $500 phone to express your discontent?" No. The counterweight is not buying an iPhone in the first place if side loading is important to you.

That does not fix the problem for content creators , who have to target the nearly 50% of the US market that's on iOS. I'm sure everyone at Basecamp would prefer to use androids, but they just can't be competitive with other e-mail services without releasing the Hey app for iOS.

Content creators don't have a legal right to demand to distribute to a specific smartphone any more than they have a legal right to demand to distribute inside Walmart.
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