Tim Sweeney on Apple's 15% cut: "We're not fighting for a lower commission"

November 19th, 2020, 16:07 Posted By: wraggster

Tim Sweeney has responded to Apple's new tiered commission system, reiterating that the 30% fee itself is not at the heart of his company's ongoing legal battle with the iPhone maker.
Yesterday, Apple unveiled the App Store Small Business Program, which reduces the commission fee on sales and in-app purchases to 15% for developers who earned less than $1 million in the previous calendar year.
The initiative was positioned as an effort to assist smaller and new developers, but has inevitably been viewed as a subtle response to Epic Games' ongoing complaint about the 30% fee.
Back in August, Epic added direct payments to Fortnite to avoid giving Apple its 30%. This prompted Apple to remove the game from the App Store, to which Epic responded with an anti-trust lawsuit.
Following the news of the 15% cut, Fortnite fans reached out to Sweeney, asking whether such a deal would bring the battle royale back to iOS -- not that Epic would qualify, of course.
"We're not fighting for a lower commission," Sweeney tweeted. "Epic is fighting for fair competition among mobile platform companies, stores, and payment processors. If iOS were open to competing payments and stores, we'd happily return, even if Apple's own payment service still charged 30%.
"Apple's 30% commission is not wrongful, it's just a bad deal. What is wrongful is Apple blocking competing stores and payment processors, to ensure that good deals can't be offered to developers at all."

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...wer-commission

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