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If you haven't watched Tim Sweeney's appearance on Lex Fridman (which went live two days ago ironically), he discusses this battle against Apple, which he's mai

If you haven't watched Tim Sweeney's appearance on Lex Fridman (which went live two days ago ironically), he discusses this battle against Apple, which he's maintained at a furious pace for years. He goes into detail on how the previous guidelines stifle innovation, how app developers are basically forced to implement anti-consumer practices to maintain the ridiculous costs of achieving success on the app store, etc. His Crusade for open platforms/services in general is very very respectable. Fortnite, in my opinion, has been a gold standard for F2P monetization. No gambling, no randomized loot boxes, etc. Compare that with Counter Strike 2, and I can't imagine how much money Epic has left on the table by choosing this path. So I give Tim a lot of credit for maintaining such a principled stance.

pjmlp 1y ago
I haven't seen any crusade of him against console vendors though.
- stavros 1y ago
  Don't let "better" be the enemy of "good".
  - taylorbuley 1y ago
    The way my favorite boss told me, it was "don't let `great` be the enemy of `good enough.`"
    - brutal_chaos_ 1y ago
      Good enough is how everything went to shit (enshitification). "It's an MVP? Good enough, ship it and bolt on features no one wants." Personally, I am very tired of "good enough." I wish we built great things.
      - gjsman-1000 1y ago
        "Enshitification" is probably the most self-sabotaging term we could think of; in terms of how it makes us look like whining teenagers. I will never use it in polite conversation; which would ironically be a tech company's greatest goal for if we had a word. But optics aside, this also ignores the problem that many of these businesses were not sustainable and were never sustainable. They are heading downhill, partially because they never had any ground to stand on. If we want to see less of this behavior, we should stop allowing the blitzscale strategy of running a loss to gain marketshare. This is also why the claim of "greed" or "enshitification" falls on deaf ears for them. They could easily say: "No, we lit billions on fire as an investment to keep it free and grow market share; we're now asking for some returns on that investment. We're not adding a Pro plan, we were paying for the Pro plan previously. Be thankful for how long it lasted, and how much money you saved."
        brutal_chaos_ 1y ago
        You bring up some good points. I guess I was too absolute in my statement as I didn't intend to imply it was the only problem. Given that, Windows gaining ads (nevermind the number of settings panels/windows, etc), games being released broken or loot box driven, google search once being good and now being ad driven, and a myriad of other problems have caused the downfall as well. So the big players are part of the problem too.
        gjsman-1000 1y ago
        No doubt; Windows gaining ads is the most egregious form; because it combines advertising with an upfront payment. I think many of the worst offenders, and so much of the problem, would go away if we combined a payment with a mandatory ad-free experience, for any bundled software. Buy a TV, no ads allowed on the TV itself. Buy a computer, no ads allowed on Windows itself. Buy a Mac, no ads allowed in Apple News, should it be bundled. If it's truly free software that the customer did not directly or indirectly pay for, then ads are permitted; but the moment there's a payment, it's over. You can have Free with Ads, you can have Paid with No Ads, but never both. That would not stop Discord from getting worse, or other services like them; but not allowing a paid + ad combo would solve most of the painful problems.
  - dd36 1y ago
    *Perfect
  - jmward01 1y ago
    I often say you have to judge people based on their time and the environment around them and you need to encourage whatever good moves you see. In other words, I'll take a greedy bloodsucker over an evil greedy bloodsucker any day.
    - dfxm12 1y ago
      But this is not a dichotomy. There are games out there that aren't designed to suck you dry.
      - jajuuka 1y ago
        And those companies don't have the kind of time and money to take on one of the richest companies in the world. Sometimes you need a Goliath to take on another Goliath.
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  Before anyone tries to defend this, remember that consoles are not necessarily sold at a loss. Nintendo ensures their consoles are profitable on day one, even if others might be okay with year five. In which case, yes, they are just iPhones in a big box with HDMI ports plugged into your TV. The only reason you can't do productivity tasks, is because of the restrictions, so the legally-nonexistent claim of "general purpose computing" doesn't do anything here.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Except there are indeed productivity tools for consoles as well, e.g. anything done with UWP on Windows Store can also be targeted to XBox UWP ERA environment.
  - NotPractical 1y ago
    Why would different business practices shield console makers in the first place, legally speaking? As in, even if all consoles were always sold at a loss, how would that help someone's legal case that they should be excluded here? Does the law state that, "if your business practices are incompatible with antitrust legislation, and you'd end up having to raise prices, shut down, or decrease your CEO's paycheck, if we enforced it on you, then we won't do it" or something along those lines?
bsimpson 1y ago
Tim's a selfish businessman, whose interests just happen to align with the public interest in this instance. He makes excuses about Linux market share when asked why Fortnite isn't on the Steam Deck, then ships a build for Windows ARM. Fortnite Festival, their Rock Band recreation in the Fortnite ecosystem, recently started limiting when you can purchase songs in an effort to get people to impulse buy them when available. Players call it FOMO mode. Epic is still pretty scummy and dishonest, even if in this insurance it appears to be on the good side.
- hbn 1y ago
  He tweeted one time that Apple's Find My network is "super creepy surveillance tech and shouldn't exist" because years prior someone stole his Mac and then he was able to see the location of the home where the thief lived. He seems like an idiot to me.
  - gjsman-1000 1y ago
    Ask him if he can see the geolocation of every Fornite user; or easily guess it by their chat logs, IP Address, and other behaviors.
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      I can guess your geolocation from a 14kb HTTP request. That's not what makes Find My creepy - if you can't understand the issue, that's okay too.
- Hikikomori 1y ago
  As far as being an American company they're pretty low on scummy behaviour.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- dlubarov 1y ago
  > He makes excuses about Linux market share when asked why Fortnite isn't on the Steam Deck, then ships a build for Windows ARM. What's the implication here, that he has some personal vendetta against Linux? A sibling comment seems to imply this as well. It seems like Hanlon's Razor would suggest there was just some engineering complication that they never dealt with. I can imagine a bunch of explanations for why Windows ARM might have happened first. Maybe there were fewer complications, maybe some competent engineer personally cared about Windows ARM, maybe they have Windows based testing infrastructure, etc.
jader201 1y ago
> No gambling, no randomized loot boxes, etc. > So I give Tim a lot of credit for maintaining such a principled stance. IMO, someone that drives and capitalizes on addictive spending by an underage audience should never be considered principled. While it may not be considered gambling, it’s not much better when it’s often out of control due to feeding on FOMO.
- tracerbulletx 1y ago
  Ah yes, toy makers, the true problem of our world. 30 years ago I'm sure you'd be complaining about "addicted" spending on keeping up with the most popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys. It's not evil to make things kids want and make money off it. If you don't want your kids to buy things, that's on you and its a problem from time immemorial, not a new issue with video games.
  - StefanBatory 1y ago
    In Fortnite, skins are available to buy only sometimes. At a given time, you can buy like, 6-7 of them. If you want something that is not up, well, tough luck, it may never come back.
    - itchyjunk 1y ago
      Isn't this true with collectable toys? My adult friends sure seem to be addicted to purchasing Pokemon cards. They talk about thousands of dollars spent when I am curious about numbers.
      - dfxm12 1y ago
        Yes, and? ETA: Exploiting adult whales is bad too, if that's the angle you were going.
        jajuuka 1y ago
        Is it exploiting if they participate under their own volition? Is Auto Zone exploiting people who like working on their cars?
gruez 1y ago
>He goes into detail on how [...] how app developers are basically forced to implement anti-consumer practices to maintain the ridiculous costs of achieving success on the app store, etc. This sounds absurd. What was his argument for this?
ohgr 1y ago
Fortnite - sit in lobby for 80% of the time and buy shit? Tim just wants all of his cut. And wants Apple to pay his app distribution costs... There's no good guys anywhere in this.
- Hikikomori 1y ago
  Apple extra premium downloads, nobody else can do it.
- cloudfudge 1y ago
  "App distribution costs" is laughable as an incentive. Any business that makes an app where you can and will spend dollars would gladly let you download it directly from their website in exchange for not giving up 30% of the in-app payments. App distribution costs nothing.
  - ohgr 1y ago
    390 million users. Say 10% on iOS. 39 million users. 18Gb on iOS last time Yeah app distribution costs something. Finger in the air 10's of petabytes...
    - Hikikomori 1y ago
      Why shouldn't Apple compete on pricing against others then? Drop the arbitrary %, charge for actual usage. If they're so good and cheap then everyone will stay with Apple distribution.
    - dminuoso 1y ago
      Bandwidth costs next to nothing these days. And it is also rarely if ever measured in petabytes. Commercially percentile based (in terms of speed) billing is the norm, but that only applies to businesses that act as downstream customers of ISPs Apple has global IX presences and generally maintains open peering policies, which means it only costs a few bucks monthly to maintain any given PNI (e.g. 10Gbit), and they are also available on those open routing server ports. IX presence is dirt cheap.
    - 1y ago
philipwhiuk 1y ago
> Fortnite, in my opinion, has been a gold standard for F2P monetization. No gambling, no randomized loot boxes, etc. Hard disagree. The tour-de-force on Fortnite's insane process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0
solardev 1y ago
Fortnite started as a P2W coop game where legendary weapons were all inside loot boxes. It was very predatory. Then an internal team at Epic made an experimental battle royale mode and that's what became modern Fortnite. The old one is still available as Fortnite: Save the World. Epic is largely owned by Tencent anyway, who makes a lot of their money from gambling games.
- nolok 1y ago
  Not really it started as a game for sale, in active dev trying various stuff alongside paragon and unreal 4 They ultimately refunded everyone who bought the original or the two other games
nottorp 1y ago
It's sad that the entities that forced Apple to be more open are free to play peddlers... > has been a gold standard for F2P monetization Every F2P game is the same. They waste your time until you buy IAPs out of boredom. What gold standard?
- archerx 1y ago
  Not true, you can enjoy rocket league fully without buying anything.
  - nottorp 1y ago
    "buy IAPs out of boredom". Because they keep you "engaged" doing the same thing forever.
    - archerx 1y ago
      I have never bought anything in rocket league and I have played for 600 hours. I am no where near to being bored with it because it has a near infinite skill ceiling.
adamwk 1y ago
Tim Sweeney has his own app store that does the same thing as Apple.
duped 1y ago
The only reason he is fighting Apple's monopoly on IAP is because he wants to ship the Epic store on mobile devices so he can make his 12% cut off exclusive titles. Now is that better than the Apple store? Sure! But the real problem is that users can't install their own games without going through an arbiter like Epic or Apple.
- mensetmanusman 1y ago
  Or windows, or Samsung, or tsmc, or silicon miners… it’s wrappers all the way down!
- mvdtnz 1y ago
  You mean because he wants to compete in a market?
- HDThoreaun 1y ago
  If the epic store is allowed to exist apple would be forced to allow any App Store onto their platform.
Xelbair 1y ago
>No gambling, no randomized loot boxes, etc. instead you get peak FOMO, where you never know where item will return. It might be in a week, it might be in few years. you never know.
pen2l 1y ago
I can appreciate this argument comes from folks who frequent this forum, who can discern scams from legitimate things. But I'm sad for this decision for myself and for the lay man and woman out there. In recent years I've gone out of my way to sign up for subscriptions with App Store if I have the option, because of the true boon it offered in a world of dark patterns: managing a subscription in one place where I have scope of everything, with the expectation that I won't have to jump through barriers or puzzles to cancel, clear-as-day information of when a subscription renews, how much it costs, etc. This was what Apple was good at. I hate that my friends and family will now probably unwittingly get had as a result of this.
weberer 1y ago
>His Crusade for open platforms/services in general is very very respectable You can't say that with a straight face when he's so vehemently anti-Linux. To this day, you still can't download Fortnite or the Epic Games Store on Linux. At the end of the day, all Tim actually cares about is his corporation having to pay rent to another corporation.
cedws 1y ago
The business model is still getting kids hooked on digital crack and getting them to beg their parents for money. He’s no saint either.

pjmlp 1y ago

I haven't seen any crusade of him against console vendors though.

stavros 1y ago
Don't let "better" be the enemy of "good".
- taylorbuley 1y ago
  The way my favorite boss told me, it was "don't let `great` be the enemy of `good enough.`"
  - brutal_chaos_ 1y ago
    Good enough is how everything went to shit (enshitification). "It's an MVP? Good enough, ship it and bolt on features no one wants." Personally, I am very tired of "good enough." I wish we built great things.
    - gjsman-1000 1y ago
      "Enshitification" is probably the most self-sabotaging term we could think of; in terms of how it makes us look like whining teenagers. I will never use it in polite conversation; which would ironically be a tech company's greatest goal for if we had a word. But optics aside, this also ignores the problem that many of these businesses were not sustainable and were never sustainable. They are heading downhill, partially because they never had any ground to stand on. If we want to see less of this behavior, we should stop allowing the blitzscale strategy of running a loss to gain marketshare. This is also why the claim of "greed" or "enshitification" falls on deaf ears for them. They could easily say: "No, we lit billions on fire as an investment to keep it free and grow market share; we're now asking for some returns on that investment. We're not adding a Pro plan, we were paying for the Pro plan previously. Be thankful for how long it lasted, and how much money you saved."
      - brutal_chaos_ 1y ago
        You bring up some good points. I guess I was too absolute in my statement as I didn't intend to imply it was the only problem. Given that, Windows gaining ads (nevermind the number of settings panels/windows, etc), games being released broken or loot box driven, google search once being good and now being ad driven, and a myriad of other problems have caused the downfall as well. So the big players are part of the problem too.
        gjsman-1000 1y ago
        No doubt; Windows gaining ads is the most egregious form; because it combines advertising with an upfront payment. I think many of the worst offenders, and so much of the problem, would go away if we combined a payment with a mandatory ad-free experience, for any bundled software. Buy a TV, no ads allowed on the TV itself. Buy a computer, no ads allowed on Windows itself. Buy a Mac, no ads allowed in Apple News, should it be bundled. If it's truly free software that the customer did not directly or indirectly pay for, then ads are permitted; but the moment there's a payment, it's over. You can have Free with Ads, you can have Paid with No Ads, but never both. That would not stop Discord from getting worse, or other services like them; but not allowing a paid + ad combo would solve most of the painful problems.
- dd36 1y ago
  *Perfect
- jmward01 1y ago
  I often say you have to judge people based on their time and the environment around them and you need to encourage whatever good moves you see. In other words, I'll take a greedy bloodsucker over an evil greedy bloodsucker any day.
  - dfxm12 1y ago
    But this is not a dichotomy. There are games out there that aren't designed to suck you dry.
    - jajuuka 1y ago
      And those companies don't have the kind of time and money to take on one of the richest companies in the world. Sometimes you need a Goliath to take on another Goliath.
gjsman-1000 1y ago
Before anyone tries to defend this, remember that consoles are not necessarily sold at a loss. Nintendo ensures their consoles are profitable on day one, even if others might be okay with year five. In which case, yes, they are just iPhones in a big box with HDMI ports plugged into your TV. The only reason you can't do productivity tasks, is because of the restrictions, so the legally-nonexistent claim of "general purpose computing" doesn't do anything here.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Except there are indeed productivity tools for consoles as well, e.g. anything done with UWP on Windows Store can also be targeted to XBox UWP ERA environment.
- NotPractical 1y ago
  Why would different business practices shield console makers in the first place, legally speaking? As in, even if all consoles were always sold at a loss, how would that help someone's legal case that they should be excluded here? Does the law state that, "if your business practices are incompatible with antitrust legislation, and you'd end up having to raise prices, shut down, or decrease your CEO's paycheck, if we enforced it on you, then we won't do it" or something along those lines?

bsimpson 1y ago

Tim's a selfish businessman, whose interests just happen to align with the public interest in this instance. He makes excuses about Linux market share when asked why Fortnite isn't on the Steam Deck, then ships a build for Windows ARM. Fortnite Festival, their Rock Band recreation in the Fortnite ecosystem, recently started limiting when you can purchase songs in an effort to get people to impulse buy them when available. Players call it FOMO mode. Epic is still pretty scummy and dishonest, even if in this insurance it appears to be on the good side.

hbn 1y ago
He tweeted one time that Apple's Find My network is "super creepy surveillance tech and shouldn't exist" because years prior someone stole his Mac and then he was able to see the location of the home where the thief lived. He seems like an idiot to me.
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  Ask him if he can see the geolocation of every Fornite user; or easily guess it by their chat logs, IP Address, and other behaviors.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    I can guess your geolocation from a 14kb HTTP request. That's not what makes Find My creepy - if you can't understand the issue, that's okay too.
Hikikomori 1y ago
As far as being an American company they're pretty low on scummy behaviour.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
dlubarov 1y ago
> He makes excuses about Linux market share when asked why Fortnite isn't on the Steam Deck, then ships a build for Windows ARM. What's the implication here, that he has some personal vendetta against Linux? A sibling comment seems to imply this as well. It seems like Hanlon's Razor would suggest there was just some engineering complication that they never dealt with. I can imagine a bunch of explanations for why Windows ARM might have happened first. Maybe there were fewer complications, maybe some competent engineer personally cared about Windows ARM, maybe they have Windows based testing infrastructure, etc.

jader201 1y ago

> No gambling, no randomized loot boxes, etc. > So I give Tim a lot of credit for maintaining such a principled stance. IMO, someone that drives and capitalizes on addictive spending by an underage audience should never be considered principled. While it may not be considered gambling, it’s not much better when it’s often out of control due to feeding on FOMO.

tracerbulletx 1y ago
Ah yes, toy makers, the true problem of our world. 30 years ago I'm sure you'd be complaining about "addicted" spending on keeping up with the most popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys. It's not evil to make things kids want and make money off it. If you don't want your kids to buy things, that's on you and its a problem from time immemorial, not a new issue with video games.
- StefanBatory 1y ago
  In Fortnite, skins are available to buy only sometimes. At a given time, you can buy like, 6-7 of them. If you want something that is not up, well, tough luck, it may never come back.
  - itchyjunk 1y ago
    Isn't this true with collectable toys? My adult friends sure seem to be addicted to purchasing Pokemon cards. They talk about thousands of dollars spent when I am curious about numbers.
    - dfxm12 1y ago
      Yes, and? ETA: Exploiting adult whales is bad too, if that's the angle you were going.
      - jajuuka 1y ago
        Is it exploiting if they participate under their own volition? Is Auto Zone exploiting people who like working on their cars?

gruez 1y ago

>He goes into detail on how [...] how app developers are basically forced to implement anti-consumer practices to maintain the ridiculous costs of achieving success on the app store, etc. This sounds absurd. What was his argument for this?

ohgr 1y ago

Fortnite - sit in lobby for 80% of the time and buy shit? Tim just wants all of his cut. And wants Apple to pay his app distribution costs... There's no good guys anywhere in this.

Hikikomori 1y ago
Apple extra premium downloads, nobody else can do it.
cloudfudge 1y ago
"App distribution costs" is laughable as an incentive. Any business that makes an app where you can and will spend dollars would gladly let you download it directly from their website in exchange for not giving up 30% of the in-app payments. App distribution costs nothing.
- ohgr 1y ago
  390 million users. Say 10% on iOS. 39 million users. 18Gb on iOS last time Yeah app distribution costs something. Finger in the air 10's of petabytes...
  - Hikikomori 1y ago
    Why shouldn't Apple compete on pricing against others then? Drop the arbitrary %, charge for actual usage. If they're so good and cheap then everyone will stay with Apple distribution.
  - dminuoso 1y ago
    Bandwidth costs next to nothing these days. And it is also rarely if ever measured in petabytes. Commercially percentile based (in terms of speed) billing is the norm, but that only applies to businesses that act as downstream customers of ISPs Apple has global IX presences and generally maintains open peering policies, which means it only costs a few bucks monthly to maintain any given PNI (e.g. 10Gbit), and they are also available on those open routing server ports. IX presence is dirt cheap.
  - 1y ago

philipwhiuk 1y ago

> Fortnite, in my opinion, has been a gold standard for F2P monetization. No gambling, no randomized loot boxes, etc. Hard disagree. The tour-de-force on Fortnite's insane process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0

solardev 1y ago

Fortnite started as a P2W coop game where legendary weapons were all inside loot boxes. It was very predatory. Then an internal team at Epic made an experimental battle royale mode and that's what became modern Fortnite. The old one is still available as Fortnite: Save the World. Epic is largely owned by Tencent anyway, who makes a lot of their money from gambling games.

nolok 1y ago
Not really it started as a game for sale, in active dev trying various stuff alongside paragon and unreal 4 They ultimately refunded everyone who bought the original or the two other games

nottorp 1y ago

It's sad that the entities that forced Apple to be more open are free to play peddlers... > has been a gold standard for F2P monetization Every F2P game is the same. They waste your time until you buy IAPs out of boredom. What gold standard?

archerx 1y ago
Not true, you can enjoy rocket league fully without buying anything.
- nottorp 1y ago
  "buy IAPs out of boredom". Because they keep you "engaged" doing the same thing forever.
  - archerx 1y ago
    I have never bought anything in rocket league and I have played for 600 hours. I am no where near to being bored with it because it has a near infinite skill ceiling.

adamwk 1y ago

Tim Sweeney has his own app store that does the same thing as Apple.

duped 1y ago

The only reason he is fighting Apple's monopoly on IAP is because he wants to ship the Epic store on mobile devices so he can make his 12% cut off exclusive titles. Now is that better than the Apple store? Sure! But the real problem is that users can't install their own games without going through an arbiter like Epic or Apple.

mensetmanusman 1y ago
Or windows, or Samsung, or tsmc, or silicon miners… it’s wrappers all the way down!
mvdtnz 1y ago
You mean because he wants to compete in a market?
HDThoreaun 1y ago
If the epic store is allowed to exist apple would be forced to allow any App Store onto their platform.

Xelbair 1y ago

>No gambling, no randomized loot boxes, etc. instead you get peak FOMO, where you never know where item will return. It might be in a week, it might be in few years. you never know.

pen2l 1y ago

I can appreciate this argument comes from folks who frequent this forum, who can discern scams from legitimate things. But I'm sad for this decision for myself and for the lay man and woman out there. In recent years I've gone out of my way to sign up for subscriptions with App Store if I have the option, because of the true boon it offered in a world of dark patterns: managing a subscription in one place where I have scope of everything, with the expectation that I won't have to jump through barriers or puzzles to cancel, clear-as-day information of when a subscription renews, how much it costs, etc. This was what Apple was good at. I hate that my friends and family will now probably unwittingly get had as a result of this.

weberer 1y ago

>His Crusade for open platforms/services in general is very very respectable You can't say that with a straight face when he's so vehemently anti-Linux. To this day, you still can't download Fortnite or the Epic Games Store on Linux. At the end of the day, all Tim actually cares about is his corporation having to pay rent to another corporation.

cedws 1y ago

The business model is still getting kids hooked on digital crack and getting them to beg their parents for money. He’s no saint either.