Apple is no stranger to anti-trust legal battels and this week since Fortnite developer Epic Games sued Apple over its App Store rules, more details are emerging from the lawsuit is shedding new light on how the companies came into this legal entanglement.
As part of the evidence submitted to the court, Apple has unveiled a series of emails from Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, in which he asked top Apple executives to exempt Fortnite from its standard 30 percent cut and to allow Epic to offer its own mobile app store.
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As early as June this year, the emails unveiled the detailed discussions between Epic CEO and Apple before the gaming company took action to incorporate an alternate payment mechanism into the Fortnite app, which resulted in it being banned from the App Store last week. The emails show Epic’s CEO requesting Apple for the ability to include this option months in advance, and also requesting Apple extend this courtesy to all iOS developers. In essence, he wanted Apple to restructure the App Store and iOS as we know it. There is no doubt that he knew Apple would not entertain his request in the slightest. Sweeney wrote in June;
“If Epic were allowed to provide these options to iOS device users, consumers would have an opportunity to pay less for digital products and developers would earn more from their sales. We hope that Apple will also make these options equally available to all iOS developers in order to make software sales and distribution on the iOS platform as open and competitive as it is on personal computers.”
The above was followed by an avalanche of escalations between Sweeney and Apple’s executive and legal teams. The result is in an email from Sweeney sent at 5:08 AM ET on August 13th — the day when Fortnite was removed from the App Store — in which the Epic boss assured Apple that Epic will “no longer adhere to Apple’s payment processing restrictions.”
Sweeney was cautious enough to warn Apple of the forthcoming legal battle. “If Apple chooses instead to take punitive action by blocking consumer access to Fortnite or forthcoming updates,” he says in the final email, “then Epic will, regrettably, be in conflict with Apple on a multitude of fronts – creative, technical, business, and legal – for so long as it takes to bring about change, if necessary for many years.”
Check out the full back-and-forth between Apple and Epic below:
