NAB
Epic Games continues to take on Apple, and in its latest
broadside called the multi-trillion dollar company “a disservice to
developers.”
article here
Epic Games wants to earn the right to deliver Fortnite to
iPhone users outside the App Store, or at the very least, be able to use its
own payment processing system so it can stop paying Apple commissions for the
ability to deliver its software to iPhone users.
It has filed its antitrust case in the UK, and across
federal courts, and is doing similar the same with Google.
Epic, whose market value is around $35 billion, is pitching
its mission as the David bravely standing up for a free and open next-gen internet
against the Goliath gatekeepers of an oppressive monopoly.
In a candid interview with the Financial Times, Epic
chief executive Tim Sweeney expressed his concerns that Apple and Google could
“unfairly” extend their “stranglehold” on smartphone platforms to “dominate all
physical commerce taking place in virtual and augmented reality.”
Sweeney doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to Apple,
which he sees as extracting value from creators and undermining the purity of
the metaverse to come. In contrast, he claims Epic Games wants to help creators
only gain from opportunities in the 3D internet.
“I’m terribly afraid the current monopolies will use their
power to become the next monopolies on new generations of platforms and
continue to use that power to exclude all competition. They’ve built their
platform lock-in which makes it extremely hard for any company to compete, even
if they were able to compete on fair terms. But then they don’t let them
compete on fair terms.
He concedes that Apple “won fairly in one market: hardware,”
but claims Apple uses that position to gain an unfair advantage over
competitors and other markets. “And that breaks all the competitive dynamics
that kept the tech industry healthy in the past.”
He continues, “The [Apple] app store is not a service. The
app store is a disservice to developers. The app store forces developers to
treat their software in a sub-par way to give customers a sub-par experience to
charge uncompetitive handling and processing fees to inflate the price of
digital goods.”
Epic is fighting Apple and Google currently over their
smartphone practices. If these practices continue on smartphone, they’re not
only going to dominate digital commerce and digital goods on smartphones, Sweeney
maintains, “they’re ultimately going to dominate the metaverse and they’re
going to dominate all physical commerce taking place in virtual and augmented
reality.”
As the FT points out, Apple and Google are framed
by Epic as its ideological enemies, whereas Microsoft is more of an ally. Where
does Meta fit on this spectrum?
“There are two sides to Meta,” Sweeney says. “There’s the
metaverse side, where they’ve articulated a really interesting vision. It’s in
many ways broader than Epic’s. We see this as a central entertainment medium,
and they see this as a medium that will connect everybody across distances for
any purpose including work, and just hanging out chatting. And they talk a lot
about open platform principles: they’re not building a Meta walled garden,
they’re trying to contribute to standards and practices that lead towards an
open metaverse. And I really like that vision that they’ve articulated.
On the other hand, he says Meta’s actual existing business
practices — its revenue share with creators, its ad economy — “has all the
manifestations of an entirely closed ecosystem.”
Sweeney says, “I feel their actual business is not a
creator-centric enough ecosystem. So, it is going to be a lot of work if Meta
is really to bridge the gap between their current practices and their future
vision.”
However, the nuance with which Sweeney talks about Meta may
be more to do with the fact that Epic’s business doesn’t overlap with it in
quite the same way as with Apple and Google.
“Currently, Meta doesn’t have a monopoly or even a
significant user base in any core businesses in which Epic competes, or intends
to compete,” he acknowledges. “Meta isn’t doing anything that stifles us at
all.”
He continues, “My understanding is that [Meta’s VR gear]
Oculus… don’t force all developers to use their store and they don’t block
competing stores, so it’s not analogous to the Apple situation. If it changed I
would complain about that, but we’ll have to see.”
Epic envisages an open and collaborative approach to
building the metaverse and appears optimistic of it coming to pass, despite the
obstruction, as Sweeney would see it, of certain Web2 giants — mainly because
the market will demand it.
“In the metaverse evolution… we need to expand and connect
all our systems together,” he argues. “We need to connect our economies. We
need to move our proprietary technology to open standards, file formats and
networking protocols so that all our systems can interoperate and we can all be
participants in the metaverse.
“That’s going to be a process that will happen over the next
decade. Right now, we have separate executable programs on your computer to run
Fortnite and Roblox and other things. In the future, I think you’ll see
something more like a metaverse browser that points to the right standard and
you can visit any metaverse experience. You’ll have metaverse servers that
different companies operate.
He adds, “I think it will win out over anybody’s attempt to
build a walled garden, locked-down version of that. I think the major brands
will just opt out of companies that aren’t an open road map. They’re going to
expect and demand that everybody they work with is a partner. In year one, you
open your ecosystem in this way, In year two, you open up this ecosystem in
other ways. And within 10 years, we have a completely open metaverse that
everybody is now a peer at.”
The fight continues.
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