Over the course of his career Tim Sweeney has been unafraid to take on tech industry giants.
The CEO and founder of Epic Games has had a knack for picking the right battles while also shoring up his company’s independence. Fortnite, the company’s blockbuster battle royale game, recently topped more than 15 million concurrent players and has spawned a universe of fandom.
Epic challengedestablished platforms by launching its own digital video game storefront. And the multi-billion dollar company developed the Unreal Engine, a proprietary software for making its own video games that it licenses out to other developers and animators.
Now Sweeney, 50, is embarking on the biggest battle in his company’s 30-year history: Epic is suing Apple and Google in a legal challenge that could remake the future of the digital economy.
Epic’s frustration with Apple especially, and Google to some extent, had been building up for at least three years. Ever since Fortnite grew to have a large audience, we felt stifled by several things,” Sweeney told CNN Business during a December interview.Launched in 2017, Fortnite quickly became a phenomenon. When it first debuted, Epic charged$40 to download the game — a typical price. But the company quickly pivoted to a riskier business model, betting that offering Fortnite as a free-to-play game with in-app purchases of digital items like outfits would generate more overall revenue.
The bet paid off. Though Epic has raked in billions off Fortnite’s in-game purchases — about $1.3 billion in 2020 and $1.8 billion in 2019, according to Nielsen’s gaming division SuperData — the company balked at paying a chunk of that revenue to app store owners like Apple and Google. If a player downloaded Fortnite from Apple’s App Store, for example, Apple would receive a 30% cut of all in-app purchases.
