Mudslinging
"Epic... simply wants to pay nothing for the tremendous value it derives from the App Store"
Okay Apple. So how do you justify a levy of nearly one third of the cost of any purchase made through your app store? Exactly how much effort goes into vetting each app and IAP item that goes on sale? Can you honestly say that this effort is at least equal to just under half that put in by the developers to build the app, test the app, add the new IAP items, test that they work properly and (in this case) don't break in in-game balancing?
Do you really, truely honestly believe you can justify such a huge cut? Because we developers don't for a second. This is just mudslinging - make the other guy look bad rather than trying to fix your own broken policies... we say the same thing every day in government.
The stupid thing here is that there's an easy way to sort this, and all it would take would be for Apple to eat a bit of humble pie, accept that 30% "might be a bit much", and invite Epic and others to join some kind of negotiations to establish what the new cut should be... and, possibly, how best to slice it: rather than having 30% across the board, splitting by whether the thing on sale is an app or an IAP item, how many IAP items an app offers, total revenue, total number of purchases...
But I guess that requires effort...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
