“That’s Totally Un-American”- Epic Games CEO Blasts Google and Apple

While Epic Games’ Fortnite should be a success story for Apple’s app store, but Tim Sweeney is far from happy. The CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google will testify before Congress today, and the CEO of Epic Games has a stance of his own. In a recent interview with Bloomberg Television, Sweeney lashed out at Apple and Google and accused them of being a ‘duopoly.’

Dominating interactions between consumers and businesses

Epic Games makes a good amount of money from their superhit Fortnite. The game is also a top performer on Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.

“You can’t have a tech monopoly dominating all, all interactions between consumers and businesses on a scale of billions of users,” Sweeney said. “It just creates the same sorts of a concentration of power problems. It’s the railroads, right?”

Sweeney also goes on to say how dominant companies like Apple and Google take 30% of revenue from paid apps that use their stores. The original cost of maintaining an app store is a very small fraction of what they actually charge. He also went on to reveal that the Epic Games store actually charges 12%, out of which they maintain a 5-7% profit margin.

While Google has been willing to talk but the two companies just don’t see eye to eye. Google makes it difficult to download anything from a website that is not it’s own. If you don’t use Google Play Store as default to download an app, they shoot these pop-ups. These pop-ups are terrifying security warnings, which makes a large number of users to just drop off.

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“They don’t allow competing stores”- Epic Games CEO

“They don’t allow competing stores,” Sweeney said. “Imagine a town that only allowed a Target and disallowed any other stores from building. I mean, that’s totally un-American and uncompetitive. But that’s exactly what Apple does in an absolute sense.”

Currently, Apple has an explicit policy in place saying you cannot build a store on iOS. They use their control of the operating system to prevent competition among stores, and that’s completely wrong and has to change.

There are hundreds of games on Play Stores today. If every developer could accept their own payments and avoid the 30% tax by Apple and Google we could pass the savings along to all our consumers and players would get a better deal on items. Let me give you an example, Visa and Mastercard, the card system, these vendors charge around 2.5-3.5% on all transactions which still gives them a substantial profit.

This is a perfect instance that reiterates that a 30% charge is not economical. Tim Sweeney was able to get the Epic Games Store established through exclusives that were paid for with the profits from Fortnite.

Only if these big companies would stop this monopoly and open up the economy to different developers, even the consumers would benefit, which I think is the core foundation of competition.

Sources: Bloomberg