Epic Games And Apple Give Opening Arguments As Antitrust Trial Begins

epic games apple bannerThe beginning of the end of the Epic Games vs Apple lawsuit is finally close at hand as the antitrust trial officially began yesterday with the opening arguments from both of the companies.

According to VentureBeat, Epic’s opening statement accused Apple of monopolizing the mobile games and apps market and “trapping” customers inside a walled garden called the App Store.

“When they pick up the iPhone, users enter a different world. They are locked into a closed platform where they can only download apps from Apple, and each and every time they purchase in the app, a 30% tax is imposed,” said Katherine Forrest, Epic’s legal representative.

Forrest also cited an email from Steve Jobs in 2010 in which the former CEO said that they had surpassed their competitors Microsoft and Google in figuring out ways to “lock customers” into their ecosystem.

Apple responded with an argument that the company’s innovations with the iPhone and App Store have sparked a decade of economic for game and app developers. The opening statement also painted Epic Games as a huge company that simply decided that they don’t want to pay for the innovations anymore.

“Businesses have been launched that would not have otherwise existed. Jobs have been created worldwide,” Karen Dunn, Apple’s lawyer. “A $20 billion company has decided that it doesn’t want to pay for Apple’s innovations anymore. So Epic is here, demanding that this court force Apple to get into its App Store untested and untrusted apps — something that Apple has never done.”

Dunn also argued that Apple users have multiple alternatives for digital game transactions and that the App Store has plenty of competition, including Google Play, Steam, the Windows Store, the Xbox Store, GoG, and the Amazon App Store among others. He also stated that Apple enforces its App Store policies for security, quality, reliability, protecting intellectual property, and preventing liability, policies that Epic is asking the court to have removed.

Dunn also showed evidence that Fortnite revenues on iOS made up just 7% of the game’s total revenues with 46.8% coming from Sony’s PlayStation. Xbox One accounts for 27.5% of the pie while the remaining 18.7% is divided between PC, Android, and Nintendo Switch.