Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Right, again, because these games are network economies, it's in the developer's interests to want to have as large an addressable audience of potential players as possible. And the mobile platforms have so large installed bases that they should want to be on these things. Anyway, what should each party do here? Here's my straw man. Let's right now say that the courts hold that Apple can't drag the Unreal Engine into this. Let's say Epic holds strong and decides that we are going to leave the version in the App Store that lets me buy directly from Epic. What should be done there? I did another little fun calculation. The money that Apple receives from Fortnite per year on the App Store comes to about 1/3 of a percent of App Store revenues. What is on trial here is Apple's emergent business model of the last five years—these App Store fees. If it means dropping their take rate of 1%, they should not do that. They should say, okay, we're happy to lose you Fortnite, goodbye. And they should make it unplayable on everyone else's phones. The counter-argument to that is that, first of all, it would trigger new legislation. That it would sort of have antitrust implications. There's another thing around, maybe, that they would turn off more developers from doing that because people would go, oh my gosh. I don’t have this trustworthy development platform for even my mobile game anymore. The Epic revenue is really a drop in the bucket for Apple. Here's what I think the biggest danger is for Apple. If you believe that this trend that Tim Sweeney believes in of these things are becoming more than games, they're becoming a metaverse. And if you think that is going to keep happening and accelerating, do you box yourself out of participating in that as Apple because none of the creators and developers are going to want to play on your platform, just [...] are the MOBAs and the games as a service have. As that industry becomes bigger, and bigger, and bigger, none of those play in your platform, and then all the consumers that want to consume that content now go to other devices to do that.…

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