Tim Sweeney Is Committed To A Decades-Long Fight Against Apple And Google If Necessary

It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything major about the Epic Games fights with Apple and Google over their app stores. Specifically, the game developer is concerned with the 30% store fees that the companies require from those distributing games via their mobile stores.

The fight itself has had mixed results for Epic. In Europe, there has been some progress – although not as much as Epic or their players would like. Epic's battle royale, Fortnite, which was blocked on iOS five years ago, can now be downloaded via the Epic Games Store app but Apple has put in additional hurdles for those trying to download the game that way. The primary hurdle, according to Epic, is what is being referred to as “scare screens” that discourage up to 50% of players from downloading the game.

In the US, Fortnite is still blocked from iOS devices. As laws are different in the two regions, there’s no telling when that will change.

This hasn’t discouraged Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, however. According to a report on IGN, the company has spent billions of dollars fighting Apple and Google on this. When asked about how long the company can continue funding the fight, Sweeney stated that he thinks the company “might run into serious financial problems after a couple more decades of this”. He also noted that Epic is determined to see the fight through and that he expects “large parts of this struggle [to] go on throughout the rest of this decade”.

If you’re wondering why Sweeney and Epic Games as a whole would commit such massive sums of money to this fight, he explained this as well, stating that it’s “an investment in Epic’s future” and adding that they “see a much greater opportunity for Fortnite as a business if the market is open and competition is allowed.” He also kept to what he’s been saying throughout the fight, in that this will benefit “all developers”.