All the massive revelations from Epic Games v Apple lawsuit

As all Fortnite players who once played on Apple devices know, the two companies have been embroiled in a legal battle stemming from Epic’s decision to circumvent App Store V-Buck purchases.

The result of the lawsuit is, among other things, the inability of Fortnite players on Apple to receive updates to their game.

Earlier this week, the two tech giants entered the courtroom for the first time. The revelations that have since come to light have been nothing short of shocking – with leaked services, Fortnite crossovers, and company policies now hitting the public eye for the first time.

Let’s take a look at some of the major things we’ve learned from this court case.

Epic Games

Huge Fortnite crossovers

We’ll start with what we learned about Fortnite. According to court documents, Epic were/are planning crossovers with The Rock, Naruto, LeBron James, Samus, The Hunger Games, and more.

Some of these crossovers might be scrapped concepts for Season 5, but it stands to reason that big names like LeBron and The Rock are still on the table.

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Lackluster Esports earnings

Competitive Fortnite players have been complaining about the dwindling prize pools of Fortnite esports for a while. Well, it looks like we now know why.

According to a spreadsheet released in the court case, Epic estimated that they’d make $4.59 billion from Fortnite esports in 2019 – the year of the World Cup. It turns out that they overestimated that number by more than $154 Million.

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Walmart cloud gaming service

Emails relating to the case show that Walmart had been pitching publishers like Epic Games a new cloud-based gaming service, similar to Google Stadia.

Obviously, they didn’t want this news to get out. We have no idea when Walmart was planning on announcing or releasing the platform – only that it’s in the works.

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Sony charges for cross-platform play

Most people who pay attention to gaming news know that Sony never wanted to embrace crossplay. After all, they won the last generation of console wars and didn’t want to give any ground to Microsoft.

As we suspected, confidential court documents confirm that Sony were putting blockade after blockade in front of the crossplay integration. Tim Sweeney, Epic CEO, even said, “In certain circumstances, Epic will have to pay additional revenue to Sony.”

This could be why only a handful of AAA games offer crossplay to this day. Small and independent developers can’t afford to pay Sony’s extra charge. And yes, they’re the only platform to charge such a fee to developers.

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Some other revelations include the fact that Epic pushed Microsoft to offer free online multiplayer ahead of the Apple Lawsuit. Epic also confirmed that they offered players a free Battle Pass to compete with Apex Legends’ release – something most of us already knew.

The court case is still going, and more could come to light in the coming weeks. If it does, we’ll be sure to update you.