They can't. This is another attempt by Epic at gaining public sympathy for intentionally breaking the terms of their licensing agreement with Apple to publish on the app store.

This is a legal argument to a court attempting to get an injunction. It seems to me to have very little to do with public sympathy.

The public really doesn't give a crap about whether or not their is one contract or multiple, or the quality of apples legal arguments, which seems to be some of the core issues raised in this motion responding to Apple's motion.

It may also be a legal argument, but it's very clearly a move to gain public sentiment to their side - it's being published broadly by the media, after all.

Epic is painting themselves as the underdogs being bullied by Apple - the multi-billion dollar contract-breaking underdog.

Facing the multi-trillion dollar gorilla, if this would even be a relevent perspective.

When was Epic ever given a chance to negotiate the terms of this contract?

They were given the same chance as you and I are with Epic's TOS for their games/game store.

They wanted access to the iOS market, and the terms were there.

Which same chance is that? Please fill me in, I've never negotiated with Epic's game store.

Zero. It's take-it-or-leave-it. Standard contract negotiation "tactics" these days.

That's unfortunate, maybe neither of them should be doing it?

Is it though? If you create a set of rules for your sandbox and somebody comes along and wants to play in it but only if you change the rules and you say “no thanks”, that seems totally reasonable. Why should you have to negotiate?

The "sandbox" isn't their property anymore, it was sold to the end user when they bought the phone.

Maybe this is one of the fundamental misunderstandings of these arguments: those who think this statement to be true and those who don’t. You bought the phone, you didn’t buy the ecosystem, buying a $500 phone doesn’t give you the right to dictate the multi-billion dollar business.

But it gives the vendor the right to tax you 30% on all future purchases related to that device, even if you disapprove of the job they're doing in stewarding the ecosystem? Despite that there are plenty of other vendors standing by that would be happy to steward it if given the opportunity?

> it's very clearly a move to gain public sentiment to their side

While they have certainly engaged in PR, I really don't see this motion as being motivated by PR in any way...

> the multi-billion dollar contract-breaking underdog.

This is assuming Apple wins. If Epic is right they didn't break any contract because the terms Apple is claiming they broke were in fact not legally binding in the first place, by virtue of being illegal.

Between this PR nonsense and attempting to strong-arm it’s way into the market by introducing exclusives to PC, I have quite little sympathy for Epic.

Apple’s “bad behavior” here ultimately aligns with my desires as a consumer. By controlling the marketplace, they enforce privacy and UX controls. They use that money to improve the products I use every day.

I cannot say the same for Epic. Every battle they are starting is to degrade my experience as a consumer so they can make even more money.

Apple could cut Epic's access to developer tools, which would make it impossible for Epic to support (patch and adding features) Unreal Engine on iOS and Mac. At least this is what the article states.

The engine is released with the game, not as a stand-alone binary. The dev tools are a different story, but unrelated to the question.

And even if this did impact the engine, perhaps epic should have thought about that when playing chicken with Apple.

If I were looking for an engine to build a game on I'd have to think twice about using Unreal Engine in the future. Having the company that builds such a foundational component of the product in open war with one of the most important platforms it runs on is an added complication that would only harm me.

In this case, it seems the goals of Epic the game publisher versus Epic the component supplier really don't align, and Epic the publisher's needs are winning out.

Disagree, this lawsuit strongly supports Epic the component suppliers business as well, because one of those components they can supply and make significant money off of is payment processing.

There is a bit of a conflict between Epic the component supplier and Joe the game developer's goals here, because Joe the game developer doesn't really care whether it's Apple or Epic taking the payment processing cut. Joe doesn't necessarily lose either because Joe seems some benefit (just less) too due to competition lowering the cost of payment processing. It's just not clear cut.

In reality it probably the case that some game developers will win thanks to lower cost of payment processing dominating their cost benefit analysis, and others will lose thanks to worse unreal engine platform support dominating their cost benefit analysis.

I keep seeing two conflicting points of view in this comment thread: 1) iOS isn’t a big games platform and 2) iOS is an important platform to Epic.

Maybe iOS isn’t that important to Epic or their clients which is why they can do this.

3) Epic wants to establish a precedent against these policies for possible use in all markets. Apple is the clearest case to make, the other cases are more ambiguous, if Epic won't win this it won't win elsewhere.

The developer tools are free for anyone with a free developer account. So they still have access, just not with the account they used for distributing Fortnite. Any 3rd party dev using Unity will use it’s own account.

> The developer tools are free for anyone with a free developer account.

Developer accounts are not free. Of course $99 is not a problem for Epic or most game developers, but please be accurate.

The developer tools are free for anyone with a free developer account. Submitting apps to the store requires a paid developer account.

Again, there's no such thing as a free developer account.

Anyone with an Apple ID — which is not a developer account — can download Xcode from the App Store. However, this version of Xcode does not support prerelease versions such as iOS 14 and macOS 11, so it's not adequate for professional purposes.

Downloading Xcode at least used to require enrolling your Apple ID as a developer. I stand corrected if it doesn't now.

Apple can prevent it just by saying so, and you'd have no recourse.

Is there something inaccurate about this answer? This is what this saga is all about.