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I would speculate that the disappearance of Fortnite from the App Store is a net positive for game developers there. Fortnite sucks the air out of the room, as

I would speculate that the disappearance of Fortnite from the App Store is a net positive for game developers there. Fortnite sucks the air out of the room, as much as any #1 media property does to its category. Besides, making an Unreal Engine game for iOS hardly ever makes sense. Those are always crummy ports. You could argue Fortnite on mobile devices is itself a crummy port. Do we need more virtual joystick games? Are we deprived of Battle Royales? Ask film people whether we’d be better off without Disney, for example. Listen Epic may be right in some ways, but if Apple just arbitrarily periodically removed the #1 apps from the App Store, I’ve got a surprise for you: it would be healthy for the app ecosystem.

suby 6y ago
What? It's really quite absurd to wave away every unreal game disappearing from iOS as acceptable because they were all bad games anyway. It's likely the second most popular engine in the industry, there must be thousands of unreal games released on iOS every year. Good for the ecosystem? How many people could be, through no fault of their own, locked out of an entire platform because of this?
- hanselot 6y ago
  >Through no fault of their own is a bit of a stretch. Apple has exhibited the same behaviour wrt right to repair, and afaik there is no trivial way to install a different OS on your 'old' devices, whether they are left crippled beyond use by Moore's law approach of software design (you know, write whatever barely runs now, and assume future hardware will be able to tank it), or whether by the inability to easily replace components. This happens with every single company of this scale (and none have been this large before, right?) Yet we will continue to humour the people who are literally paid to defend their corporate overlords online.
DennisAleynikov 6y ago
you do realize Apple Park uses Unreal Engine in its AR map and many Unreal Engine games on iOS are the best in their class. Metal + the Unreal shaders look wonderful almost 100% of the time
nathanvanfleet 6y ago
Especially if the alternatives to doing that means that the really large companies get exceptions that others do not. It's actually anti-competitive to have the App Store treating Epic favorably but not some new small company trying to compete.

suby 6y ago

What? It's really quite absurd to wave away every unreal game disappearing from iOS as acceptable because they were all bad games anyway. It's likely the second most popular engine in the industry, there must be thousands of unreal games released on iOS every year. Good for the ecosystem? How many people could be, through no fault of their own, locked out of an entire platform because of this?

hanselot 6y ago
>Through no fault of their own is a bit of a stretch. Apple has exhibited the same behaviour wrt right to repair, and afaik there is no trivial way to install a different OS on your 'old' devices, whether they are left crippled beyond use by Moore's law approach of software design (you know, write whatever barely runs now, and assume future hardware will be able to tank it), or whether by the inability to easily replace components. This happens with every single company of this scale (and none have been this large before, right?) Yet we will continue to humour the people who are literally paid to defend their corporate overlords online.

DennisAleynikov 6y ago

you do realize Apple Park uses Unreal Engine in its AR map and many Unreal Engine games on iOS are the best in their class. Metal + the Unreal shaders look wonderful almost 100% of the time

nathanvanfleet 6y ago

Especially if the alternatives to doing that means that the really large companies get exceptions that others do not. It's actually anti-competitive to have the App Store treating Epic favorably but not some new small company trying to compete.