During a quite chapter in the Apple vs. Epic Games legal dispute that’s centered around Fortnite and its presence in the App Store, Elon Musk has weighed in on the matter. Musk took to Twitter to share thoughts as he often does and sided with Epic Games, the creators of Fortnite, while criticizing the fees imposed by the App Store as an example of a “de facto global tax on the Internet.”
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Musk’s comments on the App Store practices were brief and can be seen in full below. He offered his take on the App Store while offering a summarized version of Epic Games’ more extensive defense before stating “Epic is right.”
Apple app store fees are a de facto global tax on the Internet. Epic is right.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2021
Naturally, people in the replies offered their own takes on the matter with some siding with Apple and others siding with Epic and now Musk, too. Those sorts of discussions have been going on since 2020 whenever the legal proceedings first got underway, and considering how long the Apple vs. Epic Games debate has been going on now, these kinds of takes from Musk and everyone else likely won’t dry up anytime soon.
For those who don’t recall, the Fortnite situation that led to the legal debates first began when Epic Games discounted V-Bucks and added alternate payment methods for the in-game currency. That new method allowed people to pay Epic Games directly thus bypassing the App Store fees.
It’s a move that would’ve led to cheaper V-Bucks because of the absence of the fees, but Apple wasn’t having it. Apple responded by removing Fortnite from the App Store which soon prompted a response from Epic Games. The Fortnite creators filed legal papers in response to Apple the same day which showed that the publisher anticipated this sort of reaction to its attempted bypassing of the fees.
Since then, we’ve gotten periodic updates on the legal proceedings, but things haven’t been nearly as busy as they were when everything went down in the first place. Epic Games even attempted to loop players into the matter, too, with a “Free Fortnite” campaign.
“Epic is one of the many game developers who has long worked to advance better and fairer platform practices, such as cross-platform gameplay, communication, accounts, and items in Fortnite on 7 platforms (though now only 6),” Epic Games said after the game was removed from the App Store. “We are committed to securing lasting freedoms for all. This is why we fight.”
