>They should have sued and never have done their "pay direct" thing if they wanted to stay operational on Apple platforms during the lawsuit.

That would have made the chances of the lawsuit being thrown out over BS standing issues much higher

> They should have sued and never have done their "pay direct" thing

If they did that, any court hearing the lawsuit would throw it out because Epic would not have standing. Epic had to do it this way to have any hope of a court hearing their case.

They would only have no standing on the fact that you can't provide other payment methods in your app. They bring up many complaints in their lawsuit[0], mainly there being no competing app store for iOS and 30% being 10x the 3% most regular payment processors charge for processing and fraud detection. I (and you) obviously can't say whether or not the case would be thrown out in a different situation since it didn't happen, but I don't see why it would be thrown out since both of those points seems fair for a antitrust lawsuit, and 30% of sales is enough to mean millions in potential damages.

0: https://cdn2.unrealengine.com/apple-complaint-734589783.pdf

Epic already had standing to sue from the $300 million in Fortnite IAP fees Apple has collected.