- Apple Inc AAPL disclosed its plans to a California federal judge to challenge and justify Epic Games Inc’s antitrust lawsuit over the former’s 30% App Store developer fee ahead of the May 3 trial, Bloomberg reports.
- Apple justified the fee with its huge investment behind developing the proprietary infrastructure supporting the App Store, including software development kits and application programming interfaces.
- Epic has earned over $700 million in revenue from the iOS customers during Fortnite’s two years of availability on the App Store.
- Epic Games discounted Apple’s app review process benefits like malware attack control on the iOS platform in the interest of developers and consumers by seeking to remove every kind of restriction on the apps, cited Apple.
- Epic reportedly gained immensely from the contractual relationship with Apple. Apple also repeatedly criticized Epic’s well-strategized attack for launching its payment system and app store on the iOS platform.
- Epic plans to attack Apple over unfair utilization of their monopoly position by forcing developers to deliver their software through the App Store and making money out of the paid transactions.
- Apple will counter Epic’s allegation by highlighting the video game transaction market fragmentation, including strong players like Nintendo Co Ltd NTDOF NTDOY and Microsoft Corp’s MSFT Xbox gaming consoles, that restrict the software that can run on their hardware and charge fees to developers.
- Apple will corroborate on the payment options available for video game transactions, like the purchase of virtual tokens from game developers on other platforms like Windows PCs.
- Apple and Epic CEOs Tim Cook and Tim Sweeney will appear at trial with their small army of economists.
- Price action: AAPL shares traded higher by 0.81% at $128.94 in the premarket session on the last check Thursday.
© 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
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