Epic Games Is an Unreliable Narrator(daringfireball.net)
daringfireball.net
Epic Games Is an Unreliable Narrator
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/09/29/epic-games-unreliable-narrator
5 comments
The charitable interpretation is that Epic misunderstood the consequence of being kicked off the App Store and assumed that SIWA would stop working as well. The uncharitable one is that Epic spread FUD so SIWA users would convert to email/password logins and Epic would have a more direct line to them.
Epic's outright lie in their help document makes me lean towards the uncharitable interpretation:
> Apple previously stated they would terminate “Sign In With Apple” support for Epic Games accounts after September 11, 2020, but today provided an indefinite extension.
Epic's outright lie in their help document makes me lean towards the uncharitable interpretation:
> Apple previously stated they would terminate “Sign In With Apple” support for Epic Games accounts after September 11, 2020, but today provided an indefinite extension.
From court docket:
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.364265...
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.364265...
hollandheese(1)
Today’s session with the judge shows the immense difficulty epic is going to face as this plays out.
They explicitly disobeyed Apple’s legal rules; got removed just like any other developer who does, and sued them in response. It doesn’t require the judge to have a lot of tech knowledge to roll their eyes at this obvious trolling.
If you walk into a store, and refuse to pay tax on something, it’s not going to go well for you. It doesn’t matter if you think tax is unfair. That’s part of what you agree to when you enter that store and purchase a product from them. Everyone who enters that store knows they have to pay tax. We all agree to. Sometimes we agree to change those taxes when we as a society democratically agree those taxes are not fair. But not my straight up not paying them. This is called fraud, and Epic skipping out on the 30% with its back door switch could potentially be seen as such legally if a significant enough profit was made.
While people do it all the time; a sensible person is not just going to skip out on paying taxes because they feel a particular tax is not fair. They can help fight to change those taxes, or the laws surrounding them; to create a more better/more balanced solution, but if a business suddenly flipped a switch that stopped them from paying taxes the IRS is going to be pounding down their doors extremely quickly.
Apple is only even a monopoly within the Apple ecosystem and it is what partly defines their ecosystem. If you don’t like it, there’s a fantastic, open-source alternative! (Android) Which even has F-Droid, etc; if you feel you also really need your choice of app stores on your choice of platform.
I am positive this is the logical justification the judge could easily give to rule in Apple’s favour.
I’m not even sure why they are wasting the legal fees on this, when the way they went about it assured it could never succeed, legally.
I highly doubt they could not make more money from outright selling the game for months? It’s not super logical to me.
Sure, create a lobby with some other companies to go all in together to legally fight something like this, or something. Don’t just try to sneak around not paying fees and then sue them when they find out. Come on.
If you walk into a store, and refuse to pay tax on something, it’s not going to go well for you. It doesn’t matter if you think tax is unfair. That’s part of what you agree to when you enter that store and purchase a product from them. Everyone who enters that store knows they have to pay tax. We all agree to. Sometimes we agree to change those taxes when we as a society democratically agree those taxes are not fair. But not my straight up not paying them. This is called fraud, and Epic skipping out on the 30% with its back door switch could potentially be seen as such legally if a significant enough profit was made.
While people do it all the time; a sensible person is not just going to skip out on paying taxes because they feel a particular tax is not fair. They can help fight to change those taxes, or the laws surrounding them; to create a more better/more balanced solution, but if a business suddenly flipped a switch that stopped them from paying taxes the IRS is going to be pounding down their doors extremely quickly.
Apple is only even a monopoly within the Apple ecosystem and it is what partly defines their ecosystem. If you don’t like it, there’s a fantastic, open-source alternative! (Android) Which even has F-Droid, etc; if you feel you also really need your choice of app stores on your choice of platform.
I am positive this is the logical justification the judge could easily give to rule in Apple’s favour.
I’m not even sure why they are wasting the legal fees on this, when the way they went about it assured it could never succeed, legally.
I highly doubt they could not make more money from outright selling the game for months? It’s not super logical to me.
Sure, create a lobby with some other companies to go all in together to legally fight something like this, or something. Don’t just try to sneak around not paying fees and then sue them when they find out. Come on.
It seems there was, in fact, no evidence for these claims other than Epic saying so. Notably Epic did not publish any documents from Apple, and as Gruber points out it would be against Apple’s interests to cut off people who used Sign in with Apple.
On the internet false claims spread widely and the corrections rarely make it as far. So I think it’s worth considering this article, especially in light of the judicial hearings today where the judge in charge of the case treated many of Epic’s arguments as non credible or unsupported.