Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…This is a major escalation here. Yeah. That says, if you don’t submit an updated version of Fortnite to the App Store that doesn’t violate our terms and services, we are going to ban your developer account. What that means—if you dig into it is—we are going to make it so that you can no longer distribute new versions of the Unreal Engine to your developers that they can compile in their code and then submit to the iOS or Mac App Stores. They’re basically saying, look, all iOS and Mac App Store, we’re just going to break the ability to use Unreal Engine if you're a developer on those app stores. Now they have got a two-front war. There’s a Fortnite war and Apple has dragged the Unreal Engine into this. Of course, this goes to the courts. There’s an injunction filed. The most recent couple of pieces of information that we know are that a judge—for at least the next month—has said, Apple this thing that you’ve done bringing the Unreal Engine into this. You can’t put a little ticking time bomb on Epic and say that you’re going to break their developer account that deeply to the point where Unreal Engine won’t work for all of these game developers anymore. That’s one step too far. The thing that you can keep haggling about is whether Fortnite needs to submit a new version that doesn’t violate your policies and has only a transaction with Apple that pays the 30% cut. That’s still in fairgrounds to fight about. Apple, you can keep Fortnite out of the App Store for anyone who’d want to download it now. They didn't mandate. I don’t believe that you have to keep letting the existing version of Fortnite work on people’s phones, but it is. I expect that Apple has a very powerful kill switch at its disposal. We will see if Apple decides to stop allowing the existing version of Fortnite with the payment loophole that’s on 100 million-plus phones or tens of millions of phones to break. But that is the state of where things are today. Yeah. Just right before we went to record, Epic hit back and announced that existing Fortnite instances running on Apple devices are going to lose access to the next Fortnite season and cross-play ability. They'll no longer be able to play with friends that are on other platforms, whether that’s Android, a console, or PC.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.