It’s just been over a week since Fortnite developer Epic Games initiated an unusual legal battle with antitrust with Apple over its App Store rules, and the lawsuit sheds new light on how the companies came into conflict.
Today, Apple went into evidence for a series of emails from Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, asking Apple’s top executives to grant exemption Fortnite of its standard 30 percent cut and to offer Epic its own mobile app store.
In early June, the emails show extensive discussions between Sweeney and Apple before Epic took action to find an alternative payment mechanism in the Fortnite app, which resulted in it being removed from the App Store last week. The emails let Sweeney lobby for Apple for the power to include this option months in advance.
“If Epic could allow these options to be delivered to users of iOS devices, consumers would have the opportunity to pay less for digital products and developers would earn more from their sales,” Sweeney wrote in June. “We hope Apple will make these options available to all iOS developers at the same time to make software sales and distribution on the iOS platform as open and competitive as on personal computers.”
What follows is a series of escalations between Sweeney and Apple’s executive and legal teams. The result was sent in an email from Sweeney at 5:08 AM ET on August 13 – the day of the possible removal of Fortnite of the App Store – in which Epic CEO tells Apple CEO Tim Cook and fellow executives Phil Schiller, Craig Federighi, and Matt Fischer that Epic “will no longer comply with Apple’s restrictions on Apple’s payment processing.
Sweeney is going to warn Apple about the upcoming legal battle. “If Apple instead chooses to take sanctions by blocking access to consumers Fortnite as upcoming updates, “he says in the final email,” Epic will unfortunately be in conflict with Apple on a multitude of fronts – creative, technical, business and legal – as long as it takes to bring about change, if that takes many years. ”
Read below the full back and forth between Apple and Epic:
