The future of growth is doomed: understanding Apple v. Epic - part 1.
Some introductions.
When Epic Games started legal proceedings against Apple Inc in 2020, it claimed that ‘Apple's policies lead to higher prices for consumers and less innovation in the app marketplace’.
By then, Epic’s cash cow Fortnite had reached revenues of 700 million dollars from Apple’s iOS ecosystem alone, and 90% of the AppStore top 10 games was and still is dominated by titles (single sku) that were on average 5 years old, including Clash of Clans and Candy Crush both released in 2012.
For additional context, most top studios operating those games were and still are owned or partially owned by tech giants from the United States and China. Tencent notably detains 40% in Epic and over 80% in Supercell.
What is amazing in the latest decision of April 30, 2025 in Apple v Epic is not necessarily that it insists in breaking down Apple’s ecosystem, but resides more in its silence on assessing the merit of the antitrust claims that are at the source of the lawsuit.
Further, and this is probably the most dramatic here, the legal system believes, as well as millions of blatantly misinformed opinion leaders who express no doubt when calling the April 30, 2025 decision a ‘huge win for US-based iOS app’, that dismantling a private ecosystem that has been at the source of (mostly American) fortunes and innovations across the digital landscape for almost 20 years, and that has paved the way for a revolution in micro finance and dematerialization, is somehow a good thing for the consumer.
What it reveals is a profound misinformation about how the AppStore and its payment processing operations have come to dominate the preferences of users globally.
Before AppStore, how did it work? And if AppStore vanishes, or diminishes by making its simplest core (payments) a matter of choice, will users be better served?
Do having more ways to pay and more places to buy from really going to lower prices and increase innovation like Epic seemed to promise when it started suing Apple? What is innovation in the context video games?
So far, it looks like that the April 30, 2025 decision is only going to benefit apps that are already generating the most revenues from iOS. Isn’t it surprising given that Epic, who’s adamant to bring back Fortnite to Apple “as fast as possible”, always justified the lawsuit in the name of combatting “a few corporations controlling not just digital items and games but everything”, while being itself one of those corporations?