Shall We Play a Game?
Apple and Epic go thermonuclear…
Last week, in trying to think about how the Apple/Epic battle would play out, I thought that, if nothing else, Apple might recognize the poor optics of this dispute and try to resolve things quickly and quietly, behind the scenes. Plus, they had clearly been outmaneuvered by Epic and seemed ill-equipped to respond to well, this. As I quipped, Apple was playing checkers while Epic was playing Fortnite.
Rather than retire with a tip of the cap to Epic for the Jobsian move, Apple dug in. Then kept digging. So far down that they created a bunker. Just in time to drop a nuclear bomb on Epic. Not only were they going to remove Fortnite from the App Store, they were going to pull Epic’s developer license. This meant that all the apps which utilize Epic’s Unreal Engine were in jeopardy. Thousands of apps. Maybe more.
If Epic was playing a game, Apple was not. And while Epic may have started the escalation, Apple seemed determined to finish it. Their statement says as much. No prisoners, no mercy. A full surrender or see ya.
If this feels like a disproportionate response from a $2T company well, you don’t work at Apple. It’s hard to know if they view this as some sort of existential threat (to their services narrative, at least) or if they’re just legitimately pissed off by the Epic maneuver. Anyone who follows Apple closely knows that they hate bad press. And Epic pwned Apple last week.
And yet, it’s still unclear how this actually plays out. Certainly, it seems like Apple is standing on solid legal ground. Epic broke their App Store rules and Apple responded. But there are bigger battles being fought here.
One is with regulators, who are looking into Apple, alongside the other tech giants, around anti-competitive behavior. This may not be that in the letter of the law, but in every other alphabet, it sure reads that way.
The far bigger battle remains the one for the hearts and minds of two core groups, which are intertwined: developers and users. Apple’s entire business is built on the foundation of those two. With seemingly each passing week, Apple is eroding that relationship with developers thanks to moves like this one. And if that continues, at some point, it has to change the other side of the equation as well. Users may not want to walk from the products they know and love, but they will if the apps they know and love just aren’t there.¹ Apps like Fortnite.
So while Apple may think they’re standing on some sort of moral high ground here, they’re failing to recognize the moral mountain right next to them. They should be leading by example, not by excuses. Developers want a “new deal” with regard to the App Store. Apple is in no way obliged to give it to them, of course. But it seems incredibly short-sighted to not engage in this debate given everything else going on. Let alone to drop nuclear bombs instead.
That’s easy to do when you’re a massive company — perhaps the most massive ever — that needs a growth narrative. Apple wants what every company which becomes the first $2T company wants: to become the first $3T company.
Hard to say where we go from here. “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?”
¹ Of course, this presumes that Google also isn’t at war with Epic forever.
