Fighting Apple Cost Epic Games $1 Billion—Money Well Spent?

The post Fighting Apple Cost Epic Games $1 Billion—Money Well Spent? appeared first on Android Headlines.

May 8, 2025 - 13:33

Sometimes, doing the right thing and standing up for your beliefs can be difficult. It can also be costly. Take Epic Games, for example, whose fight against Apple cost the company more than $1 billion. But according to its CEO, Tim Sweeney, it was all worth it.

The Epic fight against Apple

During an interview with Business Insider’s Peter Kafka, Sweeney revealed that Epic Games taking on Apple cost the company probably close to $1 billion. We’re not just talking legal fees here, but also potential revenue loss. According to Sweeney, Epic spent over $100 million in legal fees alone.

However, he adds, “But if you look at lost revenue, that’s another story. We can’t predict exactly how much we would have made on iOS, but in the two years that we were on the platform, Fortnite had made about $300 million on iOS. So you could have projected hundreds of millions of dollars of lost revenue as a result of the fight.”

Kafka also pointed out that during the company’s fight with Apple, Fortnite was essentially unavailable from the App Store. This means that for five years, players who could have played Fortnite couldn’t.

“So Apple cutting off Epic from access to the entire iOS audience, that not only affects the players that are directly denied access to Fortnite, it also affects all of their friends who might have played Fortnite more or might have played Fortnite but didn’t, because their friends weren’t able to play,” said Sweeney. “So you could easily imagine that there’s been a billion dollars or more of impact to Epic in this time.”

Bringing about change

However, the CEO thinks it was worth it because it resulted in change. Otherwise, companies like Apple and Google will keep reaping the profits off the backs of developers forever.

While Apple mostly won in the initial lawsuit, the judge ruled that Apple had to give developers the choice of using their own channels when making in-app purchases, and that the company couldn’t take a cut. Apple refused, which brought the company back into court. Now the judge has ruled that not only did Apple lie under oath, but it must now comply, and there could be a potential criminal investigation.

In the meantime, the Cupertino company is facing a class action lawsuit brought by over 100,000 developers. It also says it plans to appeal the latest ruling.

The post Fighting Apple Cost Epic Games $1 Billion—Money Well Spent? appeared first on Android Headlines.