[threeseed]

Of course they lowered the prices.

It was a PR exercise to show the world the wondrous benefits of a potential Epic Games Store on iPhone/Android.

And of course once they had such a store they pinky promise to never increase the prices in the future.

[reissbaker]

I think the point is that competition will prevent them from doing that. And it worked: in response to Epic's lower rates, Steam also cut their rates. If Epic raises the rate to 30% they'll be more expensive than Steam, and won't be able to compete.

[threeseed]

I just checked and Fornite is not available on Steam.

So all that will happen is that certain games will exist only in one store and not be subject to competition.

Or they will secretly sell your data to third parties which Apple won't do.

[reissbaker]

Fortnite is not required to be on Steam for there to be competition in the game store marketplace. As a game developer on PC, if you don't like Valve, you can switch to Epic, regardless of whether Fortnite is there or not — and Valve has no policies prohibiting you from doing so if you want to (unlike iOS, where Apple prohibits alternate game stores). You might sell fewer games because it's less popular, but that's not due to any anticompetitive action on Valve's part — and it may not matter that you sell fewer games, because Epic may pay you enough for exclusivity that you make up the difference anyway. The "injury" that Epic is trying to prove with Apple is that game developers are injured by lost sales due to Apple's policies, or lost revenue due to Apple's cut, and that this is due to Apple's anticompetitive policies that (literally do) prohibit competing stores from existing and offering developers an alternative. Game developers are not injured — at least, not in the terms usually used in antitrust cases — by Fortnite only existing on the Epic store and not on Steam.

You might argue that consumers are somehow injured by Fortnite existing on the Epic store but not on Steam. But I think that's pretty hard to prove, at least under existing antitrust law: Fortnite is free, and its microtransactions are not particularly more expensive than competitors, and if you don't want to play Fortnite because you don't like the Epic store for some reason, there are dozens of competing battle royale shooters on every platform Fortnite runs on (and, now, even platforms Fortnite doesn't run on). Where is the lack of competition? Or the injury?

Epic's case centers on injury not to consumers, but to developers. That case is easier to make, and it's the case they care about because they operate a game store that doesn't exist on iOS due to Apple's policies — and a game engine business that operates on a 5% revenue share model, which naturally would increase its profits if Apple stopped taking a 30% tithe from developer revenues in the first place. They're perfectly willing to sacrifice Fortnite Mobile, a comparatively small amount of revenue, temporarily if it gets their other business streams more income in the future.

[tech234a]

I think they were referring to the percentage taken when processing sales for other developers on the Epic Games Store and Steam.