Apple and Epic and you, the megathread

[spacegojira]

@Antidamage

They most assuredly are on Epic’s side both in regards to monopolies and microtransactions. Epic and Fortnite are their template for what paid content should be - you want it, you buy it. No gambling aspect, no winning loot boxes aspect, you just pay for the thing you want. And regardless of any of that, law doesn’t operate on emotive views like that. The law doesn’t like or dislike a company.

The key thing to remember is that whether Apple is a monopoly or not largely depends on legal specifics, but the EU is capable of making law in order to force Apple to behave better even if it’s slipping through the cracks. The only problem with that is it’ll take a decade and we’ll all be dealing with a new monopolistic player then.

Wrong, they are absolutely NOT on Epics side. Epic had to defend itself last year when being questioned by the UK parliament: https://www.businessinsider.com/fort…e-harry-2019-6

While this is in the UK, the EU will eventually follow up on this (as memberstates are currently in the process of enacting legislative models restricting microtransactions, e.g. Belgium recently) and issue a EU-wide restriction for microtransactions in general, considering how often underage kids spend hundreds to thousands of Euro on it, which would defacto end Fortnites current business model. It just takes time, like every new EU wide policy.

Epic Fortnite microtransactions are no different to loot-boxes, with their “rotating offers”, encouraging players to buy an item while it’s available, using a psychological trick - just like loot-boxes do.

Epic is in no way a template for paid content, don’t be silly, they had lootboxes themselve not long ago.