Fortnite Coming Back to the App Store?
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said over the weekend (via The Verge) that Epic will use its Epic Games Sweden account to submit Fortnite to the App Store in the U.S. Apparently, Sweeney has spoken to Apple about the issue, and based on his wording, it sounds like Apple could allow the plan, but he did not say that he has explicit approval from Apple.
Tim Sweeney (last week):
We will return Fortnite to the US iOS App Store next week.
Not Monday or Tuesday. Beyond that, we’re working as hard as possible and aren’t certain what day it will be ready.
If Apple were going to allow Fortnite back into the App Store they could have done so at any point in the last four years. And there’s nothing, not a word, in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’s decision last week that says Apple needs to reinstate Epic Games. I think Apple just stays the course and Fortnite remains persona non grata as far as the App Store is concerned.
It has cost Epic Games more than $100 million to challenge Apple’s App Store rules in the ongoing Apple vs. Epic Games legal battle, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said today in an interview with Business Insider.
Sweeney said that Epic Games has paid “legal bills” in excess of $100 million, but that the dispute has cost the company a lot more.
But if you look at lost revenue, that’s another story. We can’t predict exactly how much we would have made on iOS, but in the two years that we were on the platform, Fortnite had made about $300 million on iOS. So you could have projected hundreds of millions of dollars of lost revenue as a result of the fight.
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Maybe I'm just old but this whole thing is just insane to me. Developer wants to distribute application on operating system platform, platform vendor disallows it through built-in technological means based on legal stipulations.
Did Stallman not warn us about EXACTLY this like 40 years ago?
Meanwhile I just had my first run in with the "You are not allowed to install this on your Mac, and there's no setting that you can change" experience.
Fucking hell. PowerPoint better be good, because in a few years I'll be a switcher.
@Kristoffer: I'm more or less resigned to ending up on Linux eventually. I've used macOS almost exclusively for personal stuff for years, but Apple keeps making it worse. I use Windows for work most of the time, but really would prefer something like Linux where some dumb corporate entity /can't/ impose terrible decisions.
