Epic, sue whoever you want. Fight over every last scrap of possible revenue, every real dollar from every imaginary video game outfit and emote. But for the love of God, stop asking me to care about it.
It’s been four years since Epic deliberately violated the terms of the Apple App Store on iOS and the Google Play Store on Android, instantly suing Apple and Google for the right to flog Fortnite V-bucks without paying the 30 percent cut.
And Epic won, at least in some versions of its various lawsuits — Apple beat it in the U.S. but had to open up the iOS platform to third-party stores in Europe following the Digital Markets Act, and Epic got the U.S. federal courts to declare Google a monopoly on the Android platform. The fallout from that one is still going on.
But beating two of the largest corporations on the planet in order to sell game skins to children apparently wasn’t enough of a victory for Epic and CEO Tim Sweeney. Today Epic announced yet another lawsuit against Google and Samsung, this time for making side-loading Android games too hard. It alleges that “Samsung’s recent implementation of the Auto Blocker feature was intentionally crafted in coordination with Google.”
Auto-blocker is a safety feature on Samsung phones that gets triggered when you try to install an unverified APK file. It can be disabled in the settings menu to load up third-party programs, something that’s always been possible on Android phones. Epic’s public-facing post announcing the lawsuit says that it takes “21 steps” to disable the setting, an extremely generous interpretation of the process of downloading the official Epic Games Store app and finally opening it.
Epic Games
Epic Games
Epic Games
Epic calls the process “exceptionally onerous“, and says that Google and Samsung are practicing “coordinated illegal anticompetitive dealing.” Good freakin’ grief.
Look, I’m no corporate flag-waiver. Google and Samsung (and Apple, why the hell not) are massive international megacorps that often engage in practices that are full-on evil, and to use a more relevant and non-specific term, illegal. I work for a company owned by an enormous private equity firm, and a quick search will show you that said firm isn’t exactly squeaky clean, either.
But it’s not as if Epic is some underdog fighting for our unalienable right to buy skins from the digital marketplace of our choosing. Epic took in six billion dollars in 2022, the vast majority of it off of microtransactions from Fortnite. Epic licenses the Unreal engine to game developers all over the world, and it takes a five percent cut from any game that does $3000 of revenue every three months. That’s revenue, not profit — if a $20 Steam game sells 50 copies a month, it’s paying Epic 50 bucks a month, $600 a year.
None of that is bad or wrong. Epic provides a service and charges people for it. Basic business, and not unfair or, ahem, onerous. I don’t even object to Epic suing other companies. They’re all fighting each other to get every possible dollar in markets valued in the hundreds of billions. That’s not “right” or “fair” or “natural” in some overblown Randian sense. It’s business. It’s inevitable.
No, what I can’t stand is Epic’s holier-than-thou attitude. It embarked on a PR campaign targeting its own players — the vast majority of whom are children — the minute it broke the rules and intentionally got kicked off Apple and Google’s digital storefronts. It invoked Apple’s own 1984 ad as a rallying cry of freedom, which might be the most cynical and tone-deaf thing I’ve ever seen from the game industry. And that’s an industry that once told me I was about to be a game executive’s nonconsensual sex partner.
Here I’ll point out that whether or not you think Apple, Google, and Samsung’s 30 percent microtransaction cut is onerous, it’s the same percentage that Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo charge for digital purchases on their consoles. And for some reason which I couldn’t possibly speculate upon, Epic has declined to sue the keepers of the keys to players on the Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch. Platforms where loading up third-party game stores would be all but impossible.
Epic is engaging in deliberate manipulation of the court of public opinion first, the court of law second. Its constant public statements and video game animations invite you, and your kids, to pick sides in a fight that isn’t yours and never will be.
It’s exhausting, in the same way that TV channels and cable providers run advertisements at viewers telling them to call their opponents and “demand” the opposite party give them more money. It’s a corporate pissing contest, and framing it as anything less than that is insulting to the intelligence…which might be why Epic is mostly targeting children with its messaging.
Yesterday Tim Sweeney said, “we want our kids to grow up in a world that’s better than this one.” In 2022, Epic was forced to pay $520 million for manipulating children into buying Fortnite V-bucks and violating their privacy. Tim, forgive me if your words sound hollow. Or better yet, don’t — forgiveness from a billionaire game exec isn’t something I particularly need.