Much of the confidential information in the trial involving the gaming industry and Apple and Epic Games has been superficial. Epic, founded by Mr. Sweeney in 1991, has more than 3200 employees and has recently been valued at $28.7 billion. It also shows that Tencent (Tencent) has 37% ownership.
Epic's development engine "Unreal Engine" generated $97 million in revenue for Epic Games in 2019, while Fortnite generated 400 million downloads (to date) and billions of dollars in revenue. Within two years, Apple generated $700m in revenue from more than 100m iOS accounts using Fortnite.
Epic's own store has more than 180m registered accounts and 50 million monthly active users. For Epic, profits are not expected to begin until 2023. At the end of 2019, Sweeney designed a plan called "Project Liberty", which the judge said was a "high attack on Apple and Google."
The judge said Sweeney said under oath that he would accept the deal with Apple if Epic was given an advantage without the involvement of other developers. But Epic has said publicly that it is fighting on behalf of all developers to promote an open platform.
According to information disclosed by Apple, App Store, which was launched with 452 apps in 2008, had registered more than 300,000 game apps and more than 30 million iOS developers by the end of 2019 (Apple has deleted more than 2 million old apps).
The judge pointed out that Apple initially set a 30 per cent commission and only recently changed it (currently charging 15 per cent for small businesses under $1 million and 15 per cent for subscriptions after a period of time). It is worth mentioning that in the early days, Apple's fees were accepted as generous to developers compared with other platforms.
The judge pointed out that games accounted for 81 per cent of App Store's total revenue in 2016. There is also evidence that high buyers equivalent to 1 per cent of iOS gamers account for 64 per cent of App Store game sales, spending an average of $2694 a year.
For Apple, the Epic also has its downside. The judge said:
[via VentureBeat] @ VentureBeat
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