Tim Sweeney
speaker
640 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Tim Sweeney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And so if that fee is more than the profit from a natural company, then they can only stay in business by raising prices. So these 30% fees are raising prices of all digital goods. It's just inflationary as a force in the economy. That's just the first direct tax. But then to reach users, when a user searches for
Before Apple blocked Fortnite on iOS, when a user searched for Fortnite, the first result was always some competing game. That's utterly anti-user. You search for Steam for a game, and if that game's on Steam, it's the first result, always, because Steam's not getting inshittified with advertising. Apple is. And, you know, they do that so they can make even more than 30%.
So if you want to be the first search result for your game, you're probably paying more, like 45%. If you want to reach users on social media, you're paying another 20%. So literally something like 70% of the revenue for your game is just going into... junk fees to acquire users and get them in your game.
And the money that's left over is only enough to fund these, you know, games with rather abusive practices that do not look to normal gamers like games for the most part. Now, there are some exceptions. There are some great games on iOS, and there are some games with good practices. But, you know, the engine has been really corrupted in a way that competition would fix.
If you unleashed lots of competing stores on iOS, then you'd have lots of awesome options, and you'd have much better deals and much better prices.
All companies are terrified of Apple, um, because Apple can destroy their business. Um, Epic was in a unique position with Fortnite. First of all, having the biggest game in the world at the time we started the fight with Apple. And second of all, having a majority of our users playing on PC and console meant that if we lost access to iOS during a fight, then we would still be able to survive.
That said, I pick apart Spotify, Facebook, you name the top 10 mobile apps, I think none of them would be able to survive without Apple. Literally, their business would be destroyed if Apple blocked access to them. Apple is incredibly... clear with developers that they're willing to deprive all users of access to any app if they get in a fight.
And if you look at how they dealt with Epic, they were not just legally maneuvering with the intent of winning the court case against us, they were also sending a message to all developers in the world, we will destroy your business, or we will try our best if you fight us. And a very small number of vocal developers have been willing to speak up.
And Apple was actually refrained from crushing their businesses when they weren't violating any Apple policy's And that took a bit of discipline, which I think is also an amount of calculation by Apple that they couldn't survive being seen as the company killer. If you criticize us, we'll crush your company.
But the other thing that Apple has that they can and will readily deploy against every developer is soft power. When they take 30% and advertising is so expensive, soft power by Apple, like approving your updates faster, Or slowing down all of your updates by a couple of weeks can also have a dramatic effect on your ability to compete successfully.
In Apple, it's a very long history of playing cat and mouse games with developers. It's like a developer isn't in Apple's good graces, so just slow down the updates. So they've been slowing down updates for several major tech companies, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, all going under the radar because everybody's afraid to challenge them publicly.
And so Apple's wielding a soft power can change a company's economics for the worse enough to deter almost any public company. And, you know, Epic is in the fight because I firmly believe that something like the metaverse will only arise. It's something like a billion-plus user, you know, real-time 3D social ecosystem that grows to encompass...
potentially all or most major games by all major developers tied together into an open economy where they all participate as peers and they all compete to give users the best deals and they grow and do business with their customers directly. That thing can only exist if the Apple and Google gatekeeping monopolies are lifted. And it's not just the 30% fees.
The 30% fees are economically ruinous, but they impose other levels of control. Apple prevents all web browsers on iOS from implementing web standards better than Apple does. So Apple has really limited data storage capabilities and 3D graphics capabilities on the iOS web APIs, the APIs you can access from web apps running within a web browser.
And, you know, that's to intentionally cripple those apps to ensure that they can't possibly compete with native apps. And by depriving web apps of those features, they prevent web apps from competing with native apps. Well, you know, Apple, if they treat the metaverse the way they treat the web, they'll say you can only use Apple's metaverse engine. Unreal Engine is disallowed.
And then they can impose all of their own limitations on the metaverse to force all commerce through Apple or force it to be... so uncompetitive and lousy that it can't compete. And they have this giant array of these anti-competitive techniques that they use to disadvantage other app developers, saying only Apple can build certain kinds of apps or only Apple can integrate certain features.
In Europe, even where the DMA law requires Apple to allow competing stores, they say, a store can only be a store. You can't build a store into Facebook. You can't build a social network into a store. A store must only be a store because a store that's more than a store might be able to compete with us more effectively.
It's just a giant, to use the Soviet term, it's a defense in depth strategy where they've constructed a massive series of barriers. each are fatal to any attempt to compete, so that even if one barrier is overcome, the others remain in place and shut down the whole scheme.
And that's playing out in Europe, where Apple has enabled us to launch the Epic Games Store, but has made it so difficult and uncompetitive, both for Epic and for clients who we want to do business with, that it has no chance of success until the European Union starts to really enforce the DMA law and impose harsh and serious penalties on Apple to force compliance.
Thanks. Competition makes everybody better. You have a monopoly that's forced to compete. Suddenly the monopoly's products get much better. The offerings to consumers get much better. You see so many areas where Apple could be the best, but what they have is just really, really lousy.
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