I don't think so.

10 years ago, Epic made the Citadel demo for themselves to show that smartphones could run Unreal Engine 3.

Unity was eating their lunch in mobile. They simply saw how dominant mobile gaming was becoming and did what they had to do to survive.

Absolutely no one was waiting for UE to legitimize Apple's devices. Game developers will use the tools that are present on the platform. All that matters is shipping the game.

The only people who were impressed with Epic's demos were the tech "press".

If Unity and Unreal Engine disappeared from iOS you'd probably lose at least 50% of the games on that platform, if not more. Likely almost all of the top revenue-generating titles. People use middleware like UE and Unity to compensate for how difficult it is to ship games on Apple's platforms (along with others) instead of building for Apple's SDK. The citadel demo is the tip of the iceberg.

> to compensate for how difficult it is to ship games on Apple's platforms (along with others) instead of building for Apple's SDK.

Apple's SDK doesn't contain a game engine.

Right, it actually contains two game engines:

2D => https://developer.apple.com/spritekit/

3D => https://developer.apple.com/scenekit/

Alongside lots of other game related goodies, https://developer.apple.com/games/

Some seriously willful ignorance to pretend that a scriptable scenegraph is the same as a game engine. Netcode, entity systems, loading/streaming systems, matchmaking, achievements, level editors, material/shader editors, model editors, physics, particle systems, lighting, sounds, voice chat, plugin libraries/mods,... the game engine of today is a big thing, & well integrated.

Second, who would adopt a platform specific "game engine" like scenekit? Are you going to rebuild your whole game to port it, is that the plan here? Apple is categorically unable to compete with actual game engines exactly because they dig their own hole, invent their own proprietary closed technologies (metal, scenekit) up & down the stack. They aren't playing keep up with the real tools, a game of "me too": they can't begin to compete with the real deal even if they tried.

Surely you must be joking?

That's kind of the point. It makes it disingenuous when Apple says "everyone loves our SDKs, they're getting so much value out of them that a 30% cut is a bargain!" when everyone is papering over the APIs with a game engine and would be just as happy with a generic chipset vendor OpenGL ES implementation

The same kind of people that adopt platform specific game engines like PhyreEngine, and sign console exclusives.

Apple engines are so bad that Cocos2D-x is basically a copy of their features, using C++ instead of Objective-C/Swift, one of the engines that Google and Microsoft give first class on their platform SDKs.

Not every game engine needs to be a bullet point list copy of Unreal capabilities.

And no I am not joking, contrary to many here, I had a past life in demoscene, been a former IGDA member, previous GDCE attendee (London and Cologne), have been inside a couple of known AAA publishers and have kept my contacts from them.

You're right. It seems like a weird way to build to me, but I can confess to that being a bias. Plenty of people do opt to build to platforms, & adopt narrower tech. Go everyone, whatever you use.

yes, it does https://developer.apple.com/scenekit/

I think this kind of behavior is wide-spread - Climbing a ladder and then kicking it down once you're on the top because you don't need it anymore. Twitter is the famous example of doing that where they grew their network on the backs of third party clients, and then rate-limited them out of existence.

The lesson here is: invest in protocols and open standards, not “apps” and closed platforms.

Yes, 100% agree. The problem always seems to come when there is money involved. Especially when you take someone elses money, and then get corrupted by the pressure of returning the principal with interest. You get slow-cooked into compromising your ideals, even if you personally were never greedy/malicious. I suppose that's easy to say for me, since I was never in that position :)

This is obvious, until you realize that the line between company and customers(shareholders) have been blurred, creating perverse incentives.

The same citadel demo made for Flash C++ support.

Apple didn't need Epic support, the only other phone that actually had hardware support for GL ES 1.0 was Nokia N95.

And mobile games have been a thing since J2ME, Brew, Symbian, Windows CE/Pocket PC, with stores getting commissions all the way up to 80%.

Maybe Epic would rather develop games against the early 2000's store model from mobile operators.