The IT Nerd

This battle between Epic Games and Apple has been interesting to watch. However, yesterday’s move by Apple to cut Epic off from using Apple’s developer tools is a major mistake by Apple. One that will bite Apple in the rear end.

Here’s why.

By targeting Epic Game’s access to Apple’s developers tools, Apple by extension is targeting the maintenance of the Epic Unreal Engine that is used many third party game makers to allow them to create the visuals behind a lot of really popular games. All these third party developers have nothing to do with this fight. Yet they’ve now been sucked into this fight. Because if Epic Games cannot make updates to the Unreal Engine, third party game makers can’t create or update their games. And that will create the perception that Apple has way too much power. And all this latest move by Apple does is to take the argument that Apple has way too much power, wrap it up in pretty wrapping paper, put a bow on it, and presents it Congress for them to slap Apple with an anti-trust investigation.

I’m not sure if this is what Apple intended. But the die has been cast. And Apple is going to need to think long and hard about whether this is really such a good idea, and if they want to change course to deal with Epic Games so that all these third party game aren’t collateral damage.

Over to you Apple.

This entry was posted on August 18, 2020 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple, Epic Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.