“Success is not illegal. “ In this sentence released by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, of the Northern District Court of California, lies all the ambiguity of the judgment rendered, Friday, September 10, in the lawsuit opposing the company Epic Games – at the origin of the successful game Fortnite, which has 400 million users – to Apple, which hosted the game in its app store. Even if he agreed with the first, he partially cleared the second.
At the height of its glory, Epic Games wanted to go to war against the application stores that are the Apple App Store, but also the Google Play Store, which will be the subject of a second trial. The reason for his anger: the commissions levied by these companies on the applications present on their platforms. Between 15% and 30%, as far as Apple is concerned.
Challenging this system, Epic Games offered players to Fortnite, at the end of August 2020, to go through its own payment system to access the same services, at lower prices. A willful breach of his contract with Apple. The response from the Cupertino company was immediate: the game was removed from the App Store.
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From then on, Tim Sweeney, the director of the company, usually discreet, has continued to spread on social networks against the toll levied by the large platforms, condemning their dominant position and the advantages that they would gain at the expense of the developers who provide them with content. Before him, others, including Spotify, contested this predominance of platforms. More recently, Microsoft and Facebook have rallied to his cause.
In its judgment, the California court rejected this argument: “Apple does not have a monopoly on the market for transactions in mobile games”, sliced Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. In fact, the Apple brand, despite its prestige, only holds a reduced market share in the mobile market (around 15%) compared to phones running Android operating systems (Google).
However, the court decision considers that Apple, by its mode of operation, is “Anti-competitive”, as it prevents developers from redirecting consumers to their own websites and payment methods. Consequently, the Californian justice issued an injunction valid on all the national territory, which allows the developers to integrate in their applications of “Buttons, external links or any other means of action directing customers to payment mechanisms” other than those of the apple brand.
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