Epic Games CEO Relishes Court Victory Against Apple

Looking at the history of Apple, there seems to be not a lot of people who can say that they have beaten the tech giant in court. Tim Sweeney may have just earned a spot in that club.

Sweeney is the CEO of Epic Games — best known as the company behind Fortnite — and he won what may be a very meaningful court victory last week, by forcing a significant change in the way Apple runs its App Store.

Apple is going to appeal that ruling (and Sweeney is in a parallel fight with Google over its app store rules). But if the ruling stays put, it means the five years and the enormous amount of money Sweeney says he spent and sacrificed by challenging Apple and its CEO, Tim Cook, will have paid off.

In an interview with Peter Kafka of Business Insider, Sweeney said, "This is really one of the issues at the heart of our digital freedoms for the future. We live our lives on our smartphones. We're connected constantly to people. We work on them. We play on them. And our futures are going to be ever more connected there. So the freedom for consumers and developers to do business together is of paramount importance. If you have one monopoly gatekeeper who dictates what people are allowed to play, see, hear — and takes exorbitant fees from every transaction that everybody does online — we're going to have a much less free world than the one that we grew up in."

"I started programming back on an Apple II when I was 13: You turn the computer on, you get a BASIC programming prompt. Anybody can write code, anybody can save it to a floppy disk, you can share it with a friend, you can sell it. Those digital freedoms are essential to the future."

Sweeney added that, "Apple has two tiers of rules. They have one tier of rules for what they call reader apps, which are basically apps operated by multi-hundred-billion-dollar companies — Amazon Video, Netflix, Spotify, and a number of others. Apple lets those apps do business outside of the app. And they've previously obstructed those developers from telling users about the better deals [you could get by going to those sites directly]."

"This may be good for some companies, but not for game developers. The reason for this is that reader app exception only applied to streaming video, streaming audio, and ebook sites. Apple forced all games, all social media apps, and everything else, to only do business through their app," Sweeney said.

"So, Apple imposed a rule on all game developers, saying if you sell anything for your game anywhere in the world on any platform, then you must sell it on iOS, and you must use our payment method, and you must pay us 30 percent if your revenue is greater than a million dollars. So the game developers did not have a choice, and everything there was just marked up 30 percent, he continued.

After the curt ruling, Sweeney said that "all users are now free to learn about better deals from all developers, and all developers are free to not just accept payments outside of the app on the web, but to tell users about those alternative ways to pay and to give consumers better deals. That's a key economic gain here. Now, developers will be able to send users to the web to give them a better price, and then to make a little bit more money for themselves, too."