Both companies have appealed the first ruling in the lawsuit between Epic Games and Apple, and now here is the verdict, which could be strong after the 2021 decision.

In 2021, Epic Games failed nine out of ten claims against Apple, so the Tim Sweeney-led company appealed, as did Apple. Bloomberg reported how the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision supports the 2021 ruling. According to this ruling, Apple continues to violate California’s anti-steering laws, making it an infringement by the Tim Cook-led tech giant when it steered app users to different payment methods.

The case started in 2020 when Epic Games started to slash the Apple App Store and Google Play Store’s 30% profit margin on microtransactions and offered a direct payment method in Fortnite. In response, Apple and Google kicked Epic’s game off their platforms, prompting Epic Games to file a lawsuit against the two tech companies. Apple responded to the post-appeal ruling by saying, “The App Store continues to promote competition, drive innovation, and expand opportunity, and we’re proud of its profound contributions to users and developers worldwide.” Because of this, Epic will most likely have to pay Apple’s legal costs!

Tim Sweeney, the head of Epic Games, responded to the #BlockTheBlue Twitter campaign we wrote about. (Essentially, they miss the old authenticated blue checkmark, condemning Twitter Blue, which is also used to get a blue checkmark on Elon Musk’s social platform.) He summarized his message on Twitter this way: “People in this #BlockTheBlue pressure campaign are losers and goons. They’re the cool kids from junior high who worked to exclude us nerds from cool kid events, plus the losers who joined in to gain cred. The elite-only verification system sucked; been criticizing it since 2018. An online community like this should be a meritocracy, where everyone has an equal chance, and merit is earned rather than anointed by a corporation. Old-school Twitter had found a great expression of merit with following & retweeting. The best rose to the top. Then someone well-meaningly built a system for preventing impersonation through verification. But they broke the meritocracy with a policy deeming verification only for elite “noteworthy” users while letting Twitter employees hand out verification to their friends as a perk.

This was followed by waves of Twitter employees realizing they’d been granted a social commodity (or income stream for the crooked) and started handing out blue checks in exchange for favors or IOUs. At peak, friends of friends of Twitter employees were brokering verification. The critical point is this had nothing to do with verifying identity documents to prevent impersonation. They didn’t do that. Twitter employees just clicked a few buttons, and you were verified. And there’s Twitter’s old unwritten practice of using verification to condition user speech, for example un-verifying Louis Farrakhan as punishment for his words. I strongly disagree with Louis Farrakhan’s views, but I’m pretty sure his identity verification was never in question,” Sweeney said.

He says his criticism is not aimed at those who don’t want to subscribe to Twitter Blue but at those who support the boycott of subscribers, not the site itself.

Source: Gamesindustry, PCGamer