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Tim Sweeney Profile picture
@TimSweeneyEpic
Sep 9, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
Presumably they're just posturing for the court, but if Apple truly believes the fight over the App Store's distribution and payment monopoly is a "basic disagreement over money," then they've lost all sight of the tech industry's founding principles.

engadget.com/apple-epic-gam…
Foremost among those principles: the device you own is yours. You're free to use it as you wish. Configure it as you like, install software you choose, create your own apps, share them with friends. Your device isn't lorded over by some all-powerful corporation.
This is EXACTLY what Apple's 1984 commercial was all about. Making computing personal, overcoming the awful precedent of IBM mainframes where computer owners were reduced to essentially just leasing devices controlled by an all-powerful company.
And it's exactly what Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite is about. A new all-powerful corporation dictating the terms of users' access to their devices, forcing their way in as an intermediary between creators and users, and using that position to exert control and extract money.
And finally, creators have rights. The right to build apps, share them with users directly, and do business directly, without being herded through a single centrally planned, anti-competitive store.
The rights of users and creators are the FOUNDATION of this dispute. Money is several layers removed, as the medium of exchange between users who choose to buy digital items, and the creators who made them. Epic isn't even seeking monetary damages. We are fighting for change!

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More from @TimSweeneyEpic

Tim Sweeney Profile picture
Jan 16, 2024
The Supreme Court denied both sides’ appeals of the Epic v. Apple antitrust case. The court battle to open iOS to competing stores and payments is lost in the United States. A sad outcome for all developers.
Now the District Court’s injunction against Apple’s anti-steering rule is in effect, and developers can include in their apps “buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to IAP”.
As of today, developers can begin exercising their court-established right to tell US customers about better prices on the web. These awful Apple-mandated confusion screens are over and done forever.
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Read 4 tweets
Tim Sweeney Profile picture
Apr 22, 2023
People in this #BlockTheBlue pressure campaign are losers and goons. They're the cool kids from junior high who worked to exclude we 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.
Read 7 tweets
Tim Sweeney Profile picture
Jan 15, 2023
A very interesting development in the AI art saga: litigation against several commercialized generative AI art sites whose machine learning models were trained on art scraped from the internet without the permission of the artists who made it.
The plaintiffs take the position that machine learning trained on art produces a model that’s comparable to a lossy compression of the original work, rather than generalized learnings comparable to those of a human artist. It’s an untested area of copyright law.
This technology moved from university research labs into commercialized use very rapidly, and the case highlights that content access that might constitute fair use in a research setting may become otherwise in a commercial setting.
Read 5 tweets
Tim Sweeney Profile picture
Aug 30, 2022
Almost all of the changes in Windows 11 make it worse. Lots more nag screens, can't dock task bar horizontally (which is bad on 16:9 monitors and totally insane on widescreen), can't save files in c:\, now the task bar clock disappeared, more hard to hide crapware.
At least it's sort of acknowledged that One Drive failed since it's easy to uninstall now. But now we see a minefield of antipatterns to trick users into thinking they must create a Microsoft account to use windows, though it's bypassable. Unnecessary login to use widgets, etc.
Start menu contains a bunch of third party apps I haven't installed. Are they preinstalled, or are just links into the Microsoft Store? Are they paid ads or is Microsoft being genuinely helpful by pointing users to commonly used apps they might want? Can't tell.
Read 8 tweets
Tim Sweeney Profile picture
Jul 20, 2022
This article leads with an outright falsehood. Journalists should beware of Google PR representatives giving talking points like this - it’s no longer “spin” as it was in the earlier days of the tech industry - it’s simply lies now. And they’ve done it to us before.
I am still very bitter about the time Epic sent a confidential email to Google senior executives and general counsel, documenting our plans for Fortnite, and they took it to a naive journalist to leak it with Google talking points, not citing Google as the source.
Google maintains a list of “friendlies”, journalists who will print Google talking points without the ordinary scrutiny expected in journalistic ethics.
Read 4 tweets
Tim Sweeney Profile picture
Oct 27, 2021
This tax bill would likely end founder control of lots of independent companies - perhaps including Epic Games.

washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021…
When the press says I’m a billionaire, they don’t mean I have billions of dollars in the bank. Never had, likely never will. In my case it just means I started a company 30 years ago and my ownership stake in it is now very valuable.
For all American history, capital gains have been taxed when one sells stock. This new proposal would tax theoretical “gains” continually based on a company’s market value increasing.
Read 8 tweets

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