At the end of last week, Epic Games pulled the incredible stunt of having Fortnite bypass app stores’ 30% cut. The result is the game getting booted from both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, and lawsuits thrown at both companies. Now, it looks like Apple will be cutting its ties with the company clean off by the end of August.
Epic Games announced on Twitter that the iPhone maker is threatening to terminate the former’s dev accounts. This will, in effect, also deprive them of the dev tools needed to make stuff for iOS and macOS. This also means cutting off the Unreal Engine tools that Epic offers to other third party app makers.
Apple removed Fortnite from the App Store and has informed Epic that on Friday, August 28 Apple will terminate all our developer accounts and cut Epic off from iOS and Mac development tools. We are asking the court to stop this retaliation. Details here: https://t.co/3br1EHmyd8
— Epic Games Newsroom (@EpicNewsroom) August 17, 2020
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Epic Games is characterising this as Apple being “not content simply to remove Fortnite from the App Store”. The former is also looking to get the US courts to prevent this from actually happening.
If it’s really the case that cutting Epic Games off in this way would affect other apps that use Unreal Engine, then it does seem a bit much. But it’s possible that the company saw this coming, just as it expected to be booted when it did what it did late last week.
(Source: Epic Games / Twitter)
