> it is a multi-billion dollar enterprise that simply wants to pay nothing for the tremendous value it derives from the App Store.
Half true. EPIC doesn't really get any value from the App Store except data delivery, which they're more than willing to do themselves. Fortnite is popular enough that the app discovery part of the store is meaningless.
Apple on the other hand gets plenty of value from Epic.
For example, 10 years ago, when Epic made the Citadel demo for Apple to show their smartphones could run games. Ground breaking R&D work, gratis for Apple, & legitimizing their devices.
We'll see how much more bad blood Apple can make with developers before people start noticing & caring about the software they can't get on their i-devices.
10 years ago, Epic made the Citadel demo for themselves to show that smartphones could run Unreal Engine 3.
Unity was eating their lunch in mobile. They simply saw how dominant mobile gaming was becoming and did what they had to do to survive.
Absolutely no one was waiting for UE to legitimize Apple's devices. Game developers will use the tools that are present on the platform. All that matters is shipping the game.
The only people who were impressed with Epic's demos were the tech "press".
If Unity and Unreal Engine disappeared from iOS you'd probably lose at least 50% of the games on that platform, if not more. Likely almost all of the top revenue-generating titles. People use middleware like UE and Unity to compensate for how difficult it is to ship games on Apple's platforms (along with others) instead of building for Apple's SDK. The citadel demo is the tip of the iceberg.
Some seriously willful ignorance to pretend that a scriptable scenegraph is the same as a game engine. Netcode, entity systems, loading/streaming systems, matchmaking, achievements, level editors, material/shader editors, model editors, physics, particle systems, lighting, sounds, voice chat, plugin libraries/mods,... the game engine of today is a big thing, & well integrated.
Second, who would adopt a platform specific "game engine" like scenekit? Are you going to rebuild your whole game to port it, is that the plan here? Apple is categorically unable to compete with actual game engines exactly because they dig their own hole, invent their own proprietary closed technologies (metal, scenekit) up & down the stack. They aren't playing keep up with the real tools, a game of "me too": they can't begin to compete with the real deal even if they tried.
That's kind of the point. It makes it disingenuous when Apple says "everyone loves our SDKs, they're getting so much value out of them that a 30% cut is a bargain!" when everyone is papering over the APIs with a game engine and would be just as happy with a generic chipset vendor OpenGL ES implementation
The same kind of people that adopt platform specific game engines like PhyreEngine, and sign console exclusives.
Apple engines are so bad that Cocos2D-x is basically a copy of their features, using C++ instead of Objective-C/Swift, one of the engines that Google and Microsoft give first class on their platform SDKs.
Not every game engine needs to be a bullet point list copy of Unreal capabilities.
And no I am not joking, contrary to many here, I had a past life in demoscene, been a former IGDA member, previous GDCE attendee (London and Cologne), have been inside a couple of known AAA publishers and have kept my contacts from them.
You're right. It seems like a weird way to build to me, but I can confess to that being a bias. Plenty of people do opt to build to platforms, & adopt narrower tech. Go everyone, whatever you use.
I think this kind of behavior is wide-spread - Climbing a ladder and then kicking it down once you're on the top because you don't need it anymore. Twitter is the famous example of doing that where they grew their network on the backs of third party clients, and then rate-limited them out of existence.
Yes, 100% agree. The problem always seems to come when there is money involved. Especially when you take someone elses money, and then get corrupted by the pressure of returning the principal with interest. You get slow-cooked into compromising your ideals, even if you personally were never greedy/malicious. I suppose that's easy to say for me, since I was never in that position :)
Epic tried distributing Fortnite via side loading on Android and gave up, and ended up crawling to Google to get on the Play store so we’ve already run that experiment and it failed badly. Stores are vital for discovery at commercial scale.
Bear in mind Apple didn’t have to do a store at all. Steve Jobs was against the idea and wanted all iPhone apps to be in house from Apple only in order to maintain quality. Alternatively Apple could have implemented APIs and services for side loading apps like on Android. They chose a middle path, and why shouldn’t they? Are the two extremes really the only options that should be tolerated?
I'm not so sure that's true. They might have come to the Google Play store as part of their plan to sue Google. Their Google lawsuit has complaints about Google interfering with their third party deals with phone manufacturers.
Over in Android land, discovery is so meaningless that they switched from sideloading to being in Google Play. As much as I want Epic to be right here, I strongly suspect they're wrong. Apple and Google have trained people to be completely and utterly helpless which (totally coincidentally!) locks people into the app stores forever.
I had a kid at church show me how to sideload a GBA emulator on an iphone the other year. (I think someone lost a certificate signing key that had since expired, it required setting the clock back before installing.)
I think people underestimate the lengths bored teenagers will go through to play video games, especially free ones.
And Google's play store has value to Epic too - they started by only allowing Fortnight to be side loaded, and moved to the play store.
I suspect that the reason lots of people prefer these devices are precisely because of the app stores. They have confidence that they won't get viruses, confidence in the payment process, ability to lock down devices for kids etc. The ecosystem clearly has a lot of value.
This whole thing is about money. In the first year Epic made $500m from fortnight on ios. Of course they want a larger piece of the pie - Apple got $214m.
iOS in its first year was only 20% of EPIC's overall Fortnite revenue that year.
I'm not comparing iOS to Android - i'm comparing iOS to every platform EPIC makes money on. 20% is a big chunk yes, but 2 billion instead of 2.5 billion is still a ton of money, and they're obviously willing to sacrifice in order to get to their real goal - bringing the EPIC game store to iOS
Not cherry picking - I picked the most solid comparison of revenue between platforms I could find. No idea of the % of revenue in 2020 and 2019 - I couldn't find them.
I wonder what the conversations look like inside of Epic, because it seems to me that trying to make everything in Fortnight feel the same on iOS as it does on PC or console is a huge investment for not the sorts of returns they're looking for.
If the iOS version was just an appetizer, then you wouldn't be pushing the volume of DLC that make the Apple tax so apparently onerous for them. If you switch to desktop then your purchases are pure profit for them. If not they still make a few bucks.
Fortnite is all DLC. All their money is in people buying cosmetics. I was involved in the Fortnite space for a while and on my website, just showing people the cosmetics available was a massive profit maker for me.
And since some people (of the younger variety) can't get a PC to game on, but do have a mobile device, cutting themselves off to that profit defeats some of the financial incentive to be on that platform.
Half true. EPIC doesn't really get any value from the App Store except data delivery, which they're more than willing to do themselves. Fortnite is popular enough that the app discovery part of the store is meaningless.