Look up: Last week, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney declared war on Apple by circumventing its in-app purchases tax in the iOS Fortnite app. Apple later removed Fortnite from the App Store and later restricted Epic’s access to iOS and Mac developer accounts. Epic has launched several responses against them in response.
As evidence, Apple’s lawyers have filed an e-discussion between Tim Sweeney and Apple in court, although the discussion is rather one-sided and is handed over to the lawyers fairly quickly. On June 30, Sweeney addressed Apple’s senior executives such as Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi, and Matt Fischer in a somewhat informal email requesting changes to the App Store policy.
“Due to restrictions imposed by Apple, Epic is unable to offer consumers certain features in our iOS apps. We want to offer consumers the following features:
1) Competing payment processing options other than Apple payments, without Apple fees, in Fortnite and other Epic Games software distributed through the iOS App Store;
2) Get a competitive Epic Games Store app through the iOS App Store and through Instant Install that has equal access to underlying operating system features for software installation and update as the iOS App Store itself has, including the ability to install software seamlessly and update as the iOS App Store experience. “
Ten days later, Vice President and Associate General Counsel (read: Chief Attorney) Douglas Vetter wrote a long and serious letter to Epic’s General Counsel Canon Pence. In it, he accuses Epic of seeking unfair treatment and misuse of Apple’s resources. He also points out that pursuing Epic’s requests would jeopardize trust between Apple and its customers, as Apple could not download apps downloaded from third-party app stores such as the Epic Games Store.
Sweeney begged back with another concise email to Apple executives: “It’s a sad state of affairs that the older executives of Apple would hand over Epic’s sincere request to Apple’s legal team to respond with such self-righteous and self-serving scribe – only lawyers could suggest that Apple protects consumers by refusing the choice in payments and stores to owners of iOS devices. “
Nearly a month later, he sent another email announcing that Epic would continue to add alternative payment methods to the Fortnite app with or without Apple’s permission. That was last week, and you know the rest. The last two emails were generic emails sent from Apple to the “Epic Games team” informing them of their breaches of Apple’s policies and penalties – removal from the App Store.
