Epic Games’ decision to bypass Apple’s payment gateway led to countless discussions between two firms and the company spent months preparing for the upcoming lawsuit against Apple.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeny has given an interview in which he states that the company spent several months preparing the lawsuit against Apple. This lawsuit was codenamed Project Liberty and it was announced within hours after Fortnite’s removal from Apple’s App Store.
Epic Games prepared the lawsuit against Apple for months
As Sweeny states, the idea behind the lawsuit was to open up Apple’s platform to small developers, to give them more freedom. Maybe this led Apple to step back, remember that they reduced the commission taken from small developers.
Epic Games, with a stock market valuation of $17.3 billion, billed $1.3 billion in in-app purchases in Fortnite in 2020 and not being a publicly-traded company, has the economic independence to be able to pursue its lawsuit against Apple and Google. Since the launch of Fortnite on the App Store, it has gained 1.2 billion dollars for the company.
The problem with these data is that they are estimates and do not come from either Apple or Epic Games, so it is likely that they are not in line with reality. If these figures were correct, I doubt Epic Games would bite the hand that feeds them.
These statements, prove, once again, that the target of the lawsuit has always been Apple and not Google (ecosystem where Fortnite can be installed without any limitations through Epic installer). We could say that Google is a collateral victim of this lawsuit and could not be left out by offering the same monetary conditions in terms of the commission it keeps from each purchase.
